Good morning Opto community,
I just purchased a GE CYNC smart thermostat for my home use with a smart temperature sensor and it got me thinking if I could use something like this for my work facility.
I’m wondering if there is a way to utilize a smart thermostat with numerous wireless sensors to take temperature readings in our 83k sqft building so I wouldn’t have to run wires everywhere for thermocouples.
We are using an Epic controller for our Opto strategy and am using nodered to push weather data into the strategy.
My question is, is there a way to grab the data from the GE CYNC Smart Temperature Sensors and push it into my Opto strategy via nodered?
I did a bit of Google foo since I’m always interested in seeing if there is an API to this sort of thing.
In this case, I did not get any hits at all.
Looks like GE has locked these things down pretty hard.
Is there another type of wireless temperature sensor that works for nodered that I can push the data into my strategy? And thank you for your quick reply Ben.
Although it’s not quite the same as true wireless temp sensor, I have been interested in wireless modules that accept a Type K thermocouple for a while. Just in case it helps you or others, here are my findings:
National Control Devices: Tons of choices (almost bewildering) but everything seems to be made-to-order and will take 2+ weeks (at least that is what we waited). Also not cheap and their forum shows a lot of problems with pretty basic stuff. We ordered the Industrial IoT Wireless RTD Temperature Sensor and Wi-Fi Micro Gateway for MQTT (plus some sensors, power supplies, etc.). We got frustrated, returned it, and were refunded 100%, so they seem good to work with. I believe some of their products have Node-RED nodes built for them (although we were just trying to push data out via MQTT). Measurement Computing: Also good selection. We bought the WebDAQ 316 and found it to be wonky and although the web page that it serves could probably be scraped by Node-RED, we gave up and returned it. Pi-Plates: We bought the Thermoplate (a board that attaches to a Pi, and accepts eight (8) Type K or J thermocouples, plus four (4) DS18B20 temp sensors. Node-RED worked beautifully out of the box. Great support and low prices. Would recommend.
But alas, given all of the above, we actually went with…
wait for it…
the Rio! We put it in a nice watertight enclosure and attached it to the back of a metal tank using magnets and ran POE to it. We will add water level sensors, alarm lights/sirens, etc.
I have made some wireless temperature sensors that publish to nodered over MQTT. They use an ESP8266 and a MCP9808. I use them just to monitor cold areas around the plant to make sure pipes are not near freezing.
If your building has wifi it seems like a reasonable solution. I am not opposed in making some more for a price.
I have edited your post slightly. You are welcome to discuses options on the post topic, but this post is very ‘sales pitch’ heavy.
In future, try and help others in the thread, not just sell them something.
