November 8th & 9th, 2024
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Building a Better Thermostat

SeaGL 2017

After returning from a recent trip that occurred during the middle of a heat wave. I arrived home to find my apartment quite hot, at least 45C inside. Needless to say it wasn’t the most comfortable way to come home after 15 days out of town, I decided it was time for me to do something about it to address this so I didn’t come home to that unpleasant surprise again. Normally, this problem is solved by having a thermostat which controls the air conditioning. However, my apartment did not have a thermostat. So I decided to build one using open source software.

This talk will cover how I went about solving my problem using existing software and protocols like home-assistant, MQTT, and also some new software that was created for this. It’ll also discuss how using open software and home automation I was able to solve my issue but also make cooling my apartment smarter.

Presenters

Matthew Treinish

Matthew Treinish, IBM

Matthew has been working on and contributing to Open Source software for most of his career. He has been primarily contributing to OpenStack since 2012 and is a former member of the OpenStack TC (Technical Committee) and was previously the PTL (project technical lead) of the OpenStack community’s QA program from OpenStack’s Juno development cycle in 2014 through the Mitaka development cycle in 2016. He is a core contributor for several OpenStack projects and a member of the OpenStack Stable Maintenance Team. Matthew currently works for IBM’s Developer Advocacy team working to make Open Source software better for everyone. He has previously been a speaker at OpenStack summits, LinuxCons Japan, China, and North America, OpenWest, FOSSASIA, PyConAU’s OpenStack miniconf, and linux.conf.au.