Well that makes two of us. In fact it was the desire to do this which led me to discover the Arduino (and what a wonderful thing it is). I'm a complete electronics virgin and so am (ahem) working my way up from the bottom. I'd be very interested to hear of your plans, but my thinking so far is:
- I plan to control the heating simply by remote on/off switching of the boiler via the web.- It seems that the boiler can be switched via a 240v connection linked to the existing boiler control. Switching this should therefore be possible by adding a parallel switched circuit.
- This should be possible via a relay, controlled by the Arduino.- The Arduino should be controllable via the web via an ethernet shield. I think this will require me setting up the shield as a server and my initial understanding is I should then be able to access the ethernet server via a browser (but I'm getting out of my depth here). The Arduino certainly works stand-alone and my understanding is the Ethernet Shield should also (albeit connected to the Arduino) and therefore can be linked directly to my router with no need for a PC to be left running- My ISP uses dynamic DNS, therefore I'm I think I'm going to have to configure my router to use a dynamic dns service such as dyndns.com (I can't post a live link on my first post. Fair enough, though I can assure you I'm not a spam bot)
That's as far as I've got, though I am busy learning the basics of sketch writing and understanding electronic components (all new to me). I apologise if that's all very basic stuff. I'd be very interested to hear whether your plans are similar, to hear how you get on and to learn of any great ways you find to do this (or good links for learning). Apologies also to the forum that I've not spent to long searching on this topic (yet) on this forum, though believe me it's taken me not a few hours just to establish what I've outlined above. Don't worry, I will, but meanwhile any pointers would be very welcome.