Smart(er) Underfloor Heating System

We built a microcontroller-based IoT thermostat device that measures temperature and transfers the values to a backend. The backend analyses these values and computes an individual program with instructions that is sent back to the device.

• Usability: A smart thermostat must allow the user to set target temperatures remotely. A timetable for different heating programs would be nice.
• Energy efficiency: traditional thermostats have one big problem: The reaction time of the heating is very slow. Typically it takes 3-5 hours for the temperature to rise to a newly selected target value. Also it takes a very long time of a room to cool down again before the thermostat switches on and the process starts all over. This results in a continuous and slow rise and fall of the temperature around the desired value.This is where the main focus of our project lies. To create new approaches and algorithms to "flatten" the temperature curve and thereby keep the room temperature as close as possible to the desired value for a certain time span.

The solution architecture includes an ioT device, a restful web-service interface and a Microsoft Azure based back-end.

The back-end collects and analyses temperature data from the thermostat devices. Furthermore the back-end is able to send instructions to the devices to allow remote programming and configuration of those.