DIY Zoning: Donations

DIY Zoning Project is now accepting donations. The donations are accepted through a mechanism that was set up by SourceForge. If you feel like making a donation, you can do so by visiting a DIY Zoning Project Donations page. Currently, 5% of every donation is granted to SourceForge - they did an excellent job of supporting this project (and countless others).

Well, first of all, because it can help to make this project better. Even as it is, it takes a second place on Google search on "temperature zoning", right after Honeywell. But a lot of things are still missing. In particular:

• No pressure sensor support;
• No wall controller support;
• No economizer support;
• No wireless sensor support;
• No support for 1-Wire® USB adapter.

All these nice gadgets cost money. To be specific, the pressure sensors from AAG Electronica go for $65 a piece, and the system requires 3 of them to fully utilize the potential (details here). Two humidity sensors are required, and each of them will cost around $30.

The wireless temperature sensors cost $81 a piece retail, not including the wireless adapter.

I'm not even talking about time and efforts that went into this project. There's no way for me to ever recoup cost of time spent on R&D (two facts: a) I'm a software architect b) development started in mid-2000; figure out the cost). As someone wise pointed out once, "An engineer is a person who spends $1000 cheating electrical company out of a cent, and then spends another $1000 telling everybody how to do it". Well, it was done, and the result is available, and whatever you donate, will be accepted as a token of appreciation, no matter how small the donation is.

Feedback

It is very difficult to find an answer if you don't know the question. For example, for the first two years of the project lifetime, it was believed that initial configuration, though complicated, is no big deal for a motivated individual. Then, it turned out that this is a showstopper. Now the situation is being remedied.

Let us know about your pains.

Hardware

The project is intended to be run on wildly varying hardware configurations (for example, one known installation works on a heat pump, the other is on a water boiler, the third is on a furnace). There are just a few categories of hardware that are used, so if you have a spare and willing to help this project improve, your donation will be appreciated. Besides, it is quite possible that your sales will improve as soon as the driver for your hardware is ready ;)

Following are the classes of the hardware that are used in this project:

• Sensors:
  • Temperature;
  • Humidity (courtesy of AAG Electronics);
  • Airflow;
  • Pressure (courtesy of AAG Electronics);
  • Current.
• Actuators:
  • Dampers;
  • Damper Controllers;
  • Servo Controllers (courtesy of Chester Fitchett).

I don't think there's anybody who would consider donating a multistage variable speed fan heat pump or air conditioner, but if you change your mind, let us know ;)

Code

Code donations are just as important as hardware donations. All in all, it doesn't really matter if you provide the hardware or the driver for it - well, in latter case you've saved us some time. A DTRBoilerDriver (courtesy of Tim Small) is a good example.

Wishes

Tell us what you always wanted to have but never could - your wish may come true. Some people have requirements that others can't even think about but find them useful when they become available. For example, believe it or not, but there was a person whose significant other was driving him mad because she couldn't learn how to deal with the thermostat...

If you have a wish and want to fullfill it, you may have come to a right place.