DomeCtrl's Raspberry Pi 5-Powered ControlBox Is a Home Assistant Server for Your Underfloor Heating
Stay warm and well-lit with this all-in-one gadget — or swap the Raspberry Pi for an ESP32 for integration into an existing smart home.
Dutch home automation specialist DomeCtrl is preparing to launch an all-in-one control system to bring your radiant underfloor heating system under Home Assistant's purview: the ControlBox.
"ControlBox is what you need to control hydronic radiant floor heating [RFH] systems with Home Assistant," DomeCtr's Anton Verburg writes 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."
Inside the chunky ControlBox housing is a Raspberry Pi 5 4GB with a Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) solid-state drive (SSD) for storage — allowing it to act as a Home Assistant server itself, rather than as a client device. For those with existing Home Assistant installations, DomeCtrl promises a variant that uses an Espressif ESP32-powered WT32-ETH01 running the ESPHome firmware.
The control system takes mains voltage and provides four 1.5A mains-level outputs, 16 24VAC 500mA outputs for valves and other peripherals, three opto-isolated general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins plus two with pulse-width modulation (PWM) capabilities, all of which support up to 24VDC and can be pulled up to 5V or 12V, 32 PWM outputs dedicated to LED lighting strips with 10A current per connector, two 1-Wire line driver channels, a half-duplex RS485 bus, and 433MHz transmitter and receiver modules for wireless communication.
The company is planning to launch a crowdfunding campaign for the ControlBox in the near future, with interested parties invited to sign up for notifications on Crowd Supply, and promises that the schematics will be published to GitHub under an as-yet unspecified license — along with Home Assistant configurations.