Bazsi's Home Automation blog

Avid readers of this blog may know that I have add a few temperature sensors to my heating setup (exactly 8 of them), in order to troubleshoot an issue we had as we moved into our new house. The description how I did that is described in this post. I used DS18B20 sensors and a Raspberry Pi to monitor temperature changes which delivered measurements to my Homeassistant installation over MQTT using rpi-temperature-mqtt . Over time, I added more and more functionality to this RPi: controlling the boiler via relays and also monitoring the serial bus of my Buderus boiler. Adding all these functions incrementally was pretty simple, but as a professional software engineer, I was feeling increasingly uncomfortable with how I would reproduce the same installation should the RPi fail. As a software professional I believe in CI/CD systems, automated tests and deployment. Infrastructure as Code and all that. I have to confess that this deployment was completely unlike show it should have been don...

Avid readers of this blog might know that I already had a couple of projects around the heating in our house. The latest addition to these projects is a mechanism to listen in on the Buderus's bus to gather and log information such as outside temperature, target temperatures in the heating circuits, turn-on and turn-off temperatures of the burner, etc. My intention with this information is to improve heating efficiency (as measured in gas used) and also to get a more in-depth understanding of the engineering aspects of this system (mechanical & electronic engineering and computer science). Previously I've installed DS18B20 sensors all around, monitoring the system from the "outside", by sniffing the bus, I get a peek into the inside of the system. When I started, I've found the site https://www.holzleitner.com/el/buderus-monitor/index-en.html which contained a reverse-engineered description of how the bus system of Buderus works. Then I've stumbled into t...