Seth's House

My Heatermeter 4.0 treated me very well.. but compared to my other PID controller projects (here and here), it lacked one thing I wanted, which was Thermocouple support.

The HM community over at TVWBB is amazing.  Bryan and everyone else there (too many to name) are an incredible wealth of knowledge, and the Heatermeter development over the years has been great.   With the release of the Heatermeter 4.2.4 (TVWBB Thread,  Github), Thermocouple support is now built in.  As soon as the components were available, I ordered them up.

If you are going from a HM 4.0 to 4.2.4, there are a bunch of parts you can reuse, like the ATMega, the Raspberry Pi, and the LCD.   The rest of the components are pretty cheap so, just order new ones.  I ended up getting a new LCD, because, the 10 bucks or so was worth it to me, as I hate desoldering.

I haven’t done surface mount soldering in a very long time.. but, it wasn’t that bad. If my hands were not so shaky, this would look neater. To me, it looks like crap, but it works, so, oh well.

Here are the Thermocouple components soldered on:

Heatermeter 4.2 Thermocouple SMD components

Testing per the thermocouple testing procedure.. good to go! (13.8v input)

fancy testing holder..

Testing Thermocouple Amplifier on Heatermeter

Bit of soldering later.. all assembled!

Heatermeter 4.2 assembled

Heatermeter 4.2 assembled

Since I reused my Raspberry Pi from my HM 4.0, I just mated up the new HM and it started right up with the old settings.  Awesome!

Just waiting on a case and roto-damper now to complete the upgrade project.