Flutterby™! : Online Pools and Spas- 2005-09-22 14:50:06.006273+00

Online Pools and Spas-

2005-09-22 14:50:06.006273+00 by ziffle 4 comments

Suppose for the moment you just bought a house with a Hot Tub and a Pool, and you loved them dearly. And suppose that you want to be able to turn the heaters, automatic covers, and pumps on and off from your office so they were ready when you got home.

Does any one know how this might be done? I envision a web page with real time feed back, but I do not know where to start...

Ziffle

How much current do you need to switch? Are these things controllable from standard wall switches? If so, we've talked before about basic relay boards, the relays on each of those options should be good to 15 or 20 amps (the limit of a normal household 115 volt circuit, and thus things like standard light/wall switches, is 15 amps).

That plus a small box running a web server should serve just fine. I haven't played with interfacing kits for picking up temperature, but it looks like $25 and a little soldering will get you 4 channels and one pickup. If you go with a Via Eden

board, then get the parallel version of the relay board so that you don't have to buy an extra serial converter.

For the cover I'd just add a cheap webcam to the mix. $20 will get you something that'll show you where the cover is.

Not a plug-n-play solution, but something that would come together in a couple of evenings without any more electronics knowledge than the supplied literature would give you. I haven't used the parallel port for interfacing from Linux

yet, just Windows

, but I can't imagine that it's difficult. And if you need an additional few binary inputs that should be easy.

Lots of X-10 solutions. You want the heavy-duty appliance type stuff. X-10.com has lots of stuff but they are gross violators of pop-ups and spam.