DomeCtrl Opens Crowdfunding for Its Raspberry Pi 5-Powered ControlBox Under-Floor Heating Controller

Dutch home automation specialist DomeCtrl has opened crowdfunding for the ControlBox, designed to make it as simple as possible to integrated an under-floor heating system with Home Assistant.

"ControlBox allows you to control hydronic radiant floor heating systems with Home Assistant," DomeCtrl's Anton Verburg explains of the device. "It is designed to control thermal valves, hydraulic PWM [Pulse-Width Modulation] pumps, and related RFH devices. It can read large numbers of 1-wire temperature sensors over long cables (>6m). ControlBox also contains 32 LED-strip output channels, providing up to 2kW output. Its integration with Home Assistant gives you complete control over the heating peripherals used in your house."

The ControlBox is built around a Raspberry Pi 5 4GB single-board computer, which runs a full Home Assistant server from a bundled 128GB high-speed Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) solid-state storage drive — with plans for a lower-cost Espressif ESP32-based version for integration into an existing Home Assistant setup, unveiled when DomeCtrl first announced the device back in November 2024, seemingly shelved for now. It includes four 1.5A mains voltage outputs, 16 24VAC 500mA outputs for valves and other peripherals, three optoisolated general-purpose input/output and two PWM outputs good to 24VDC, three optoisolated inputs, 32 PWM outputs for LED strips good to 10A per connector, and an integrated 433MHz transceiver for wireless peripherals.

" By installing ControlBox in your home," Verberg promises, "you can: implement a software thermostat per room; no additional hardware is required as the user can use the native Home Assistant app on a smartphone to control the temperatures; schedule floor heater systems for automatic pre-heating so rooms are kept comfortable only when required; automatically switch off the pumps for floor heater systems when no heat is requested to save even more energy; more efficient regulation of solar heat collectors by accurately setting the switch-on time with software PID regulator, particularly useful on cold and cloudy days for effectiveness; automatically switch off floor heaters in a room when the wood stove or other heat source is on."

The ControlBox is funding on Crowd Supply now, priced at $1,550 including the Raspberry Pi 5 and 128GB NVMe. Hardware is expected to ship to at the end of July 2027, though as with all crowdfunding campaigns fulfillment is not guaranteed. DomeCtrl has also pledged to release hardware schematics, under an unspecified open-hardware license, on GitHub once the product has officially launched.