Hi,
I’m new to home assistant, but I built myself a simple heating control system some 5-6 years ago with 8 bluetooth thermostats on the radiators, some wifi switch on the heater itself, and a Raspberry Pi Zero W as the controller.
The whole thing is controlled by a handful of Perl scripts I wrote in one night back then. Accordingly, it’s not “pretty”, but it’s been working reliable for years. Meanwhile there is also a web interface with 3 buttons for on/off/automatic mode, but for all other changes, e.g. for vacations, changing thresholds etc I always have to change my scripts via a ssh console.
If I understand correctly Homeassistant runs in principle on the Raspberry Pi Zero, but it is not recommended because you quickly reach the limits? I have CometBlue thermostats, I saw they are supported by HA.
Can anyone help me with the following questions?
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for such a simple application as described above (every few minutes to query the temperatures from the thermostats via Bluetooth, when heating is needed and depending on the time of day to turn the heating on and off), can you do that with the RPI Zero? In the foreseeable future, I do not really plan to integrate more components. Perhaps at some point window sensors, so that the radiators go off when a window is open. But I haven’t found anything yet that fits optically and in terms of price. And so far it works fine without.
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the Bluetooth connections to two radiators are a bit shaky and it often takes several attempts to control/interrogate them (thick old stone walls). Is there something like a Bluetooth forwarder or can I use another Raspberry Pi Zero or alike as an intermediary?
The reason for the RPI Zero is that it fits with a tiny power supply into a German in-wall socket, which is centrally located in the apartment. I have no furniture or the like at the central point from which I have good Bluetooth reception from all the thermostats where I could hide a large RPI or another device.
Thanks for any suggestions and help!