After a year and a half, a major update to Climate Czar has finally come to light! The biggest change is that the system is no longer a WordPress plugin. This change was made so the system will run better on single board computers such as the Raspberry Pi and its various clones. This is now possible since Climate Czar now runs on the same web UI and undercarriage that was developed for the RPi Smart Still controller system.
Climate Czar now has its own built-in user management system, plus numerous enhancements to the group security policies to prevent any open entry points that WordPress left wide open. An optional dark theme option has also been added that the user can turn on or off as they wish. Numerous other enhancements have been added so the web UI plays better with mobile web browsers. Eliminating the WordPress HTML/JS bloat seriously speeds up page loading!
Next in line will be a complete redesign/rewrite of the Combo Hub which brings ethernet connectivity as well as WiFi and a new master/slave operation. LoRa WAN connectivity is being used as the backbone between the masters and slaves due to its lower frequency and higher reliability than WiFi or Bluetooth. The 2.4 GHz ISM band has become so noisy and congested and the small antenna built into an ESP32 makes matters even worse. LoRa WAN solves this.
The CZ Pellet Stove Controller will also be redesigned and rewritten for the ESP32 platform. While the Raspberry Pi Zero W works for this purpose just fine, there’s still the matter that it runs on an SD card and those wear out in a few years. An ESP32 has more than enough processing power for this and will also allow me to add an OLED display for visual feedback as to its current operational state and provide buttons for local control of the unit.
Be sure to subscribe to the Panhandle Ponics YouTube channel to stay current on updates and developments. If you have any questions or suggestions, comment on the videos or shoot me a message from the contact form!