It’s gotten very warm the past few days… lets take a crack at adding some logic to my “dumb” window AC unit to keep things cool!

The Cooling System:

My in-window air conditioner is not particurarly fancy.

What it can’t do:

❌ Remote Control
❌ Automatic turn on / off
❌ Network connectivity
❌ Turn on at set time

What it can do:

✅ Put out cool air

And to its credit, it does do a decent job at that, but I want more!

Making it smarter!

I need to know is the current temperature in the room. I’m currently doing that with an Arduino, an ethernet shield, and an Si7021 temperature / humidity sensor. It sits on my cabinet on the other side of the room and when I punch in it’s IP address it responds with a bare-bones website displaying the current data

Once a minute it also pushes a reading to my local InfluxDB server (hosted on site on a Raspberry Pi) for record keeping. I’m using Grafana to make all fo these pretty graphs.

I’ve got another Raspberry Pi connected to a Powerswitch Tail 2. It queries the InfluxDB every 2 minutes or so to get the temperature in the room and turns on, or off, the AC accordingly.

{
  "fahrenheit": 72.65,
  "celsius": 22.58,
  "relative humidity": 40.62,
  "relative light level": 0
}

You can see the code running the Arduino Sensor and the Raspberry Pi