Dave in LA

photo credit: Greencolander

So I had this idea a month ago when I first had to use my air conditioner in my apartment. This is the first apartment I’ve lived in that has AC so I guess that explains why this never bothered me before. The thing that bothered me is that my air conditioner is too stupid to realize when it has cooled my apartment to a reasonable level and can shut off. This means I end up leaving it on all night when it doesn’t really need to be on that long. Definitely and engineerable moment (one of the last two words was made up).

So my plan is to take one of these guys and join it up with one of these to make a nice little network of wireless temperature sensors that can be read from any PC with a USB or serial port. This is completely overkill for my application but my data has a similar problem that he wants temperature sensors for so I’m hoping to kill two birds with one stone.

Those two devices should make my computer aware of what the current temperature is and a nice little X10 module (or possibly something more current) can hopefully make the switching of the AC on and off nice and simple.

Now I just need to pull the trigger and buy the parts to start tinkering with this stuff. It should be pretty fun.