Hi dear community!
Just wanted to share my latest project automating my home.
We had an about 20 years old floor heating control called “Velta Genius” with a central unit controlling the thermal circuits and remote units in each room where you could set the temperature which also had a temperature sensor.
The system got more and more unstable, getting replacement parts got harder and expensive.
So I had a closer look and the main unit and found basically two PCBs in it, one with all the logic circuits and processors and stuff and another controlling the main power to each thermal circuit.
So it was quite easy to design a replacement logic board based on an ESP8266.
I designed for an ESP8266 module but finally I used an ESP07S module with an external antenna, because the units are at rather problematic places in the house WLAN wise…
!!! That’s impressive. Did you basically reverse engineered the board?
This is waaaay beyond what I am capable of, and I personally could not call this “easy”. Is there any blog post / video somewhere that you documented your journey?
Yeah quite some reverse engineering but it was quite easy.
The split between high voltage and low voltage was obvious.
Regarding the function to just switch 230V on 12 channels looking at the markings of the components it was easy to know the function, just an opto triac and a triac as a switch controlled with a low voltage.
Getting the low voltage was also quite easy (I could have measured it), on the right side is a relay as far as I can see it was meant as an isolated output where you get if heating is on or off to another device, this was not used. The relay has a control voltage of 5V and was directly routed to the logic board to a transistor, so a simple transistor switch…
Rest was easy, 15 pin cable, 1-12 control the high power switches, 13 controls the relay, 14 is supply voltage and 15 is ground.
The nice thing was because of the separation I could use the high voltage board as is without have to deal with regulations or safety…
Sorry I have no blog, I made a presentation for our FabLab but in German and just some slides with pictures…
I am still planning putting this open on Github with a detailed description.
I placed Zigbee temp sensors in every room with a cental placed RPi with a DeConz module and image connected to my HA.
I just use the single point thermostat controller of esphome and HA.
As a floor heating is so slow I dont think anything else might have a lot of benefit…
BTW browsing through some offers of old modules to buy one as spare (one of mine seems to have a little problem with the power supply unit, I had to add an additional capacitor on the 5V to get it stable for the ESP) I found that the relay is meant to control a pump.
That’s why it always turned on if any thermal circuit got activated.
I don’t need that but you could easily built that function in a sketch for ESPHome…
I know nothing about electronics, or how you did this, but I am sooo inmpressed. I too have an ageing Velta Genius system. I have 10 heating circuits on my circuit board of which one, (number 2 in line) does not function. However, I have two spare circuits, 11 and 12 on the circuit board. I assume that circuit 11 and 12 work So my question is, Am I right in thinking that if I move circuit 2 to circuit 11 and then reporogramme my wall thermometer into thinking it now controls circuit 11, will that work?
If it does, then it will save me replacing my entire system to get one half of my kitchen floor heated?
I also had problems with one of my three systems where with the original control unit some circuits made problems and if all had to be powered on the control unit always reset.
I turned out, that the onboard power supply was weak on that board, maybe some capacitor aging, I fixed with an additional capacitor and then all heating circuites worked again.
But yes, just moving the actors to other circuits and reprogram the circuit pairing could help.
To emphasize, the high power side of the system is untouched by me and is a decent design and will maybe run forever. The power supply can fail, but could be repairable with appropriate capacitors because they are normally the reason for faililng.
If interested I still have 2 or 3 three PCBs, components are simple and easy to source, if you want to switch
Hi @Alex9779 I just read this thread and I am very impressed by your work! I just bought a house with a similar system and I am wondering how it works. Would you be able to answer some questions I have? And do you still have a board in case I also want to replace the original controller?
I still have three bare boards here though I am not sure if I want to give away all, I have one prepared control system with removed logic board as a backup here so I want to keep at least one board.
Just write me a PM, then we can arrange some other communication…
@Alex9779 I sent you a PM in German because I thought you came from the DACH region. If this is not the case, I would be very happy if you could help me!
Hi @Alex9779, awesome project!
Did you end up putting your design files on GitHub?
Would you mind sharing the schematic and layout files? I have the same Velta Genius system and adding or replacing a room controller is pretty terrible.
no, one reason is that I did some refinements which I didn’t test, the other is I forgot about it
PM me an email address, then I will send you the file…
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