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NickB1 / balboa-spa-mqtt-controller

Balboa Spa MQTT Controller on NodeMCU
MIT License
5 stars 3 forks source link

Query: interface with Balboa PCB #2

Open EmmanuelLM opened 3 years ago

EmmanuelLM commented 3 years ago

Hi Nick, I am planning to create a version of your system and was a little confused as to the interface of your system. Am I right in thinking that it sits between the PCB and the display? Is the connection out to the display compulsory given the more recent PCBs have two display/wifi connectors?

I am thinking that your system could be a good way to replace the (very expensive) Balboa Wifi system

NickB1 commented 3 years ago

Hi,

Yes the interface sits in between the controller and the display. My controller was fairly old, so your mileage may vary on the display protocol being the same. I also wrote seperate functions for parsing the controller data en sending data to the display. The controller parser was trigged by clock interrupts, the display function was free running. I can remember the ESP sometimes missing clock pulses from the controller, I had to add some error checking to circumvent this.

I think a better/simpler approuch would be to just connect the controller and display together while also connecting the signals to the ESP. And then let the ESP do button presses to alter settings. You might have to use an OR gate on the button signal line to not get any conflicts between the display and the ESP.

My controller began to show more problem and I eventually built a controller from scratch which can still interface with the original display: https://github.com/NickB1/OpenSpa

EmmanuelLM commented 3 years ago

Thank you Nick, very helpful

On Fri, 20 Nov 2020 at 12:45, Nick B. notifications@github.com wrote:

Hi,

Yes the interface sits in between the controller and the display. My controller was fairly old, so your mileage may vary on the display protocol being the same. I also wrote seperate functions for parsing the controller data en sending data to the display. The controller parser was trigged by clock interrupts, the display function was free running. I can remember the ESP sometimes missing clock pulses from the controller, I had to add some error checking to circumvent this.

I think a better/simpler approuch would be to just connect the controller and display together while also connecting the signals to the ESP. And then let the ESP do button presses to alter settings. You might have to use an OR gate on the button signal line to not get any conflicts between the display and the ESP.

My controller began to show more problem and I eventually built a controller from scratch which can still interface with the original display: https://github.com/NickB1/OpenSpa

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