Eating your own dogfood

[Nofossil]

For those of you who aren't computer geeks, the title of this thread refers to a Microsoft program from the 90s in which management decreed that they should be using their own products or 'eating their own dogfood'.

I realized that I had built and sold a bunch of controllers, and that my own house was still running a predecessor with software that had increasingly less in common with the systems I was selling. Time to ingest a bit of dogfood myself. I made the switch in November, and have been gradually cleaning up the old wiring and getting it in shape. Here are a couple of pictures of the new controller in place. It has the version II internals in a hacked-up version I enclosure.

The Variable Speed drive units are for the combustion fan (installed and working), the wood boiler circ (ready to go - next on the schedule), and the bypass circ (part of next plumbing update).

It's been an interesting journey, and it was definitely the right thing to do. I had a LOT of complex control rules written in C on the old controller, and I've replaced all of them with rules using the NFCS control language.

 

[Clarkbug]

I am in envy of your controller.

Have you noticed any differences once you moved to Version II?

 

[BrotherBart]

Old saying. "Doctor heal thyself."

 

[Nofossil]

Have you noticed any differences once you moved to Version II?

It's a lot easier to build ;-)

I've made a bunch of changes to both the hardware and the code. The 4-20ma drive circuitry is now inside the box. Code can have comments, and the graphing and control panel are both much improved - I've posted a couple of screenshots in other threads. User-created custom code is also much easier to add.

I'm hoping to have a commercial version sometime early this year - keeping my fingers crossed.

 

[mole]

This must be that "Science Diet". My "control system" is more like a meal the dog scavenged from the roadside on garbage day.

 

[Nofossil]

This must be that "Science Diet". My "control system" is more like a meal the dog scavenged from the roadside on garbage day.

Here's what I was running for the last six years. Looks like something the cat (if not the dog) dragged home......