Posted by Mark on 27 Dec, 2024
It's been seven years that this blog exists - but it just sat there while I was busy. A relationship broke, others came and went, some came back ... but the Arduino fix for the fridge still works at my wife's place. That's been much more sustainable than expected!
As I'm heading off to my first Chaos Communication Congress, I've spent some hours to finally open source some old projects. This includes the fridge project and I'm sharing it now on https://bitbucket.org/mark.asbach/fridgeduino/.
Originally, I planned to prototype using the Arduino UNO and then build a minimal version using an ATtiny. Also, I thought about adding a second temperature sensor, a door open sensor, and a way to control the temperature without having to reprogram the micro controller. However, I found that all these things weren't really needed. My wife recently reprogrammed the temperature window to be 0.5 degrees warmer - and that's all that had to be changed during the 9 years that this fix is in operation (plus replacing the first relay after 1.5 years, of course).
For reference, these were some previously researched existing pieces of information that helped to get this done:
Low Power Arduino:
Temperature sensors: