Hi
Off the wall question that hopefully will stimulate some interesting answers!
I currently have thermo-sensors in every room in the house, transmitting their data via RFM69s to a central unit that reports the info via mqtt. Based on that I control the on/off state of a heat pump.
Said heat-pump blew up last November. Been wearing multiple sweaters since then, waiting for the insurance to sort themselves out. I've found a possible replacement in the UK and a long chat with the chap selling it uncovered that all the temperature probes that the machine use require hard wiring and communicate using what they call 'systembus'. I believe this is actually M-BUS (meter-bus) using R-485 as the carrier.
There is, unfortunately, no sensible way of wiring temperature sensors into each room with the required cabling.
So I'm thinking that one answer is to keep using the radio-sensors and to spoof the heat pump into believing that it has temp-sensors connected by feeding it with m-bus packets from the central/receiving unit.
Trouble is ... that I know little about this m-bus protocol! Is this a credible approach? any pointers?
thanks in advance!
Justin