Eric's Arcana and RiderX

[Updated: I was mistaken as to how much work the two chips were doing]

I had a talking thermostat at my vacation cabin. You would call it up on the telephone, enter a code, and then you could turn the system on and off, change the temperature, etc. It was a bit pricey and the UI was needlessly complex, but it worked okay. Until a few weeks ago it stopped taking my calls, and when we arrived it was 36 degrees inside the house. The thermostat was somewhat functional but would neither answer the phone nor turn on the furnace.

I did a quick jury-rig of the furnace (shorted they yellow wire and the red together) so we had some heat besides the woodstove, and then later re-installed the original thermostat.

I then started looking for a replacement. Nobody seems to sell the model I have anymore, and there are some posts about poor quality control. There are other solutions out there, but they are overly complicated and seem to assume that you want to spend $350 on a thermostat. I spent $180 on the one that broke, so I’m not going there again.

I did a few searches and realized that there is a much easier approach that covers most scenarios. I don’t really need to be able to remotely set the exact temperature of the house; what I need to do is be able to switch from a setback temperature to an occupied temperature. You can do this by simply adding a second thermostat, and then build something to switch between the two thermostats.

Enter the QKits MXA065.

This is just the ticket – it hooks straight to the telephone and drives two relays. It also has local control for them. You can find this same board in a four-channel version if you would like to do more.

The chip on the left is the CM8870, which handles the telephone side of things, outputting DTMF codes. Next to it is the ATTiny2313, which handles the UI for the interface, PIN codes, ring number support, and local push buttons.

I don’t have an online schematic for this board, but this is a similar one, which I believe is from the same company.

The board is nicely made, and all it needs is 12V. That makes my job easy.

My ugly daughter board on the right has a 12-pin terminal strip. This will be used to connect the wires to the two thermostats and to the furnace. Furnaces use 24 VAC to run their electronics, so I built the traditional linear supply to get the 12V that I need for the board – a full-wave bridge, 7812, and a couple of filter caps. This was just wiring.

One thing that I don’t like about the board is that there is no provision for remote operation; if you want to switch off a channel or even check to see whether it’s on, you have to go to where the board is installed. I wanted to put a pushbutton and status LED next to the main thermostat, so it would be easy to see. I therefore attached to the board and send those to the 4-terminal strip in the upper right; that will connect the cable to the pushbutton and LED.

Here’s the back of the board. Ugly but functional.