Hi. I set up my radiant heating system with an Arduino and rigged a normal, household thermostat to work with it. Everything works fine except that I want the water pump relay to stay on for 5 minutes after the heat relay turned off (cooling). No problem I thought. I just put a delay function. Problem is that the thermostat has a hardwired button and during the delay the program freezes and won’t respond to button input. Is there a way for the loop to keep going but still have a 5 minute pump ON function kick in every time the heating relay is switched to off, no matter what?
By the same token, I am using several if statements so the heater will only heat if particular conditions are met. But I do want and LED to blink a certain number of times depending on which part of the function it is in. But I do NOT want the loop to stop for let's say 7 seconds when I have an LED blink with 1 second intervals. I need: blink 7 times slowly but let loop continue while blinking.
Thank you kindly