Alright, stay with me on this one... (and the video explains a lot)
Our house is heated via coal all winter. It gets delivered by a truck into our sad, sad, little "coal shed" and is picked at, bucket by bucket, all winter. The Glen the Stove Project, at its core, is simple data-logging. It just happens to do it in a fancy-schmancy way.
The Plumbing:
Our little house is divided in two making a studio apartment in the back. Our flatmates live there and of which, one is a plumber. The coal stove is in our part of the house and thus, we needed a way to get heat back to our roomies. Eoin the plumber took care of most of the running of pipes and between the two of us, we put together a fairly nice "coil" of tubing that lays directly on top of the "burn box". The pipes run to a cast iron old-school radiator, the whole system is filled with water and a small pump under the floorboards circulates the water. The cold return water gets pumped back to the stove where it flows through the copper coils on top. There it picks up heat and travels back to the radiator. The system is simple and solid and works well.
The Brains:
The electronics start with a PicAxe microcontroller and some simple code, placed in a simple wooden box. There are 4 input buttons that correspond to tasks one must perform on the stove and a knob used to scroll through "menus" shown on a LCD screen. A total of (5) temperature sensors are connected to ADC inputs on the microcontroller. These little thermsistors each get a little thermal-goop applied and are then simply taped to the particular pipe or radiator they are sensing.
A small geared motor and bracket assembly is attached to a window that separates our living room from a small glassed-in sunroom. As Kari's plants are stored here, regulating the temperature is quite important. The "control box" is able to be set to a given temperature, and by opening and closing this window (via the motor) the microcontroller is able to maintain a constant temp.
More Brains:
An application runs on the host computer that I wrote in Processing. It talks to the control box and the Picaxe, and on a predetermined basis, it asks for the data from the 5 sensors. This, in turn, gets built into a string and sent off to Twitter as an status update. In addition, if any of the input buttons are pressed or a menu option is changed, this information is also turned into a Tweet and sent off.
The system is also capable of "catching" a tweet directed to it, I.e. to send it a "command" but as of now, I have not found a use for this.
I added a voice that obnoxiously announces all the tweets as they go.
And that is the basic system....
I would like to thank again, RobotGrrl for much help on the stupid Twitter API.
Check her out, her stuff is awesome. http://robotgrrl.com/blog/
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