this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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I went with Daikin 'cause they had local control.... Except that they changed it in the meantime, and I had 2 different AC splits connected to the pump, one of them is older and still has local control, while the other is newer and doesn't. Fuck all of them.
You can make a thermostat with a raspberry pi, a few sensors, and a relay board. They're pretty simple devices.
Really, you don't even need a pi. An ESP8266 would be more than sufficient.
Source: I made my own thermostat from an esp8266, some sensors, and a relay board.
I did that, for my gas heater.
AC is more complex, it has fan speed, air direction (2 of them), temperature settings and so on. I solved with an IR blaster, but that's not what I wanted, I specifically selected this brand to have local control via wifi.
Good enough for a fan, furnace, and AC setup. What we need going forward, though, is something that can intelligently use heat pumps to take into account electrical costs, current rooftop solar generation (if any), and the heat pump's efficiency ratings in order to most efficiently balance between the heat pump and a regular furnace. Can choose the balance between either cheapest way to run or the least amount of CO2 (which won't always match up). May also have to consider multi-stage setups where you can run it at low/medium/high levels.
I don't think it's impossible for a FOSS solution to do this, but I don't think anyone has tackled it, either.
That's just a software problem. Not all that difficult, assuming the hardware manufacturers don't lock you into some bullshit locked down proprietary cloud control thing.