Netduino Green Squared

With the recent energy price swings, I don't know about you, but I'm looking for extra ways to save. In today's post we're shown how we can not only save energy and money but also play with one of our favorite dev toys, netduino. The perfect weekend project...

What is one thing in the house that uses a good bit of energy, yet normally has no energy saving automation? Fabien's Bit Bucket shows us in Saving energy with a netduino

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Considering that ~25% of our heating bill goes into heating water, I felt compelled to stop this senseless waste.

The idea that I came up with was to design a scheduler, configured to follow our weekly hot water usage pattern and capable of lowering the water heater temperature down to a minimum during off-hours.

I wanted it to be cheap to build with easy-to-find parts and very reliable as my wife does not appreciate cold showers: I decided to use a netduino-mini micro-controller, an AdaFruit DS1307 real-time clock and a servo to adjust the temperature of the water heater.

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The post walks you through all steps, from building each of the parts, hooking it up and to getting the source code.

There's something cool about watching video of this turning on the water heater...

Also check out the netduino Helpers on CodePlex.

"The 'netduino Helpers' is a C# driver set for common hardware components and convenient wrappers around complex .Net Micro Framework features such as:

• Analog joysticks
• Interrupt-driven push-button
• Real-time clock (DS1307)
• 8*8 LED matrix
• AdaFruit SSD1306 OLED display
• Shift registers (74hc595)
• Runtime assembly & resource loader
• Bitmaps & Bitmap Compositions
• HiTec HS6635HB servo driver
• Serial Interface Builder

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Here’s a few more links you might find interesting:

• Some Netduino, some MIDI, a little breadboarding...
• Six Places Where I buy Netduino and other Electronics Bits
• New in the Maker Shed: Netduino, a .NET-powered open source electronics platform
• TWC9: Netduino, Twitter oAuth in Windows Phone, App skinning, and universal physics
• Netduino - .NET Micro Framework, open source, electronics platform, free (software), code walk though, cool…