Stove Temperature Monitoring with wifi, remote display, and datalogging

[802Maple]

Here is my take on a similar temperature monitoring system. It can be used as a simple standalone device, or it can be accessed via wifi and its own custom built dashboard using any standard web browser. It can also push data to the cloud for both remote access, long term data trending & visualization. The local panel has (1) green light to indicate a "Normal" condition, it has a yellow light to indicate a "Warning" condition if the stove pipe temperature is less then 25 DegF (adj) below the alarm setpoint, it has a Red Light / Buzzer to indicate an actual "Alarm" condition if the stove pipe temperature is above the setoint (adj). The Alarm setpoint is adjustable via the wifi web browser connection. Finally the green light is also a push reset button used to temporarily silence the "Alarm". The Alarm can also be temporarily silenced via the wifi web browser connection. More features & Ordering details forthcoming...

 

[Buckthorn Burner]

Here is my take on a similar temperature monitoring system. It can be used as a simple standalone device, or it can be accessed via wifi and its own custom built dashboard using any standard web browser. It can also push data to the cloud for both remote access, long term data trending & visualization. The local panel has (1) green light to indicate a "Normal" condition, it has a yellow light to indicate a "Warning" condition if the stove pipe temperature is less then 25 DegF (adj) below the alarm setpoint, it has a Red Light / Buzzer to indicate an actual "Alarm" condition if the stove pipe temperature is above the setoint (adj). The Alarm setpoint is adjustable via the wifi web browser connection. Finally the green light is also a push reset button used to temporarily silence the "Alarm". The Alarm can also be temporarily silenced via the wifi web browser connection. More features & Ordering details forthcoming...

How many monitoring points will yours have? Just stove or can you set multiple points like pipe, cat, and stove surface? Looks great.

 

[802Maple]

How many monitoring points will yours have? Just stove or can you set multiple points like pipe, cat, and stove surface? Looks great.

Hi Buckhorn Burner, thank you for the feedback. The version I posted about today has (2) inputs. (1) is used for the stove pipe temperature & (1) is used for the Alarm reset button. A future version will have (4) inputs, for additional monitoring points.

 

[begreen]

2 inputs? How does it read outside temp? Is that downloaded from a local weather station?

 

[802Maple]

2 inputs? How does it read outside temp? Is that downloaded from a local weather station?

Yes. I only displayed and mentioned some of the systems features and capabilities in my post earlier today.

 

[maverick06]

All, well I have yet again adjusted the setup.

I now have a MAX6675 reading a thermocouple. This is read by a ESP8266. That uploads the data by MQTT to a nodered server hosted on a raspberry pi which serves it up on a locally accessible website. For a guy who isnt a computer engineer, it took a long time for me to get there, but its working.

The system is watching outside weather and air temp and humidity inside. Attached is the graph for the last few days of fires. I have thought about attaching a buzzer for if it goes over an certain temp, but I havent done that yet. Pleased to be able to watch it on the computer when i am not there.

---note: apparantly the image copied has a clear background so its tiny and hard to read, but gets the point across.

 

[ewang]

Hi All,

Long time reader and first time poster. Going onto year 5 with my BK Ashford 30 which I purchased thanks to great info on here. And I've become a much better woodburner thanks to all i've learned here.

In my effort to get better at using my stove, I'd been looking for temperature monitoring options. Not finding any that really fit what I wanted, I decided to see what I could build.

Here is the 'business end' of it sitting on a bench near the stove. This has been on a breadboard for 3+ years and is waiting for me to add the 3rd thermocouple (for the stack) and put it into a better enclosure. It has stainless sheathed wires to a thermocouple on the stovetop under the Ashford's convection deck and another thermocouple in the catalyst probe hole used by the original BK cat thermometer.

View attachment 230905

The brains of it is a NodeMCU ESP8266. The 8266 is basically a microcontroller with wifi capability and variety of input-output pins. It can be programmed using the Arduino IDE over a USB connection from your computer.

The sensors are K-Type thermocouples read by MAX6675 chips. These MAX6675's talk directly with the ESP8266 and there are existing libraries to make the coding easy. In 1-off quanties off Amazon (NOT the cheapest way to get parts!), the ESP8266 and the 3 thermocouples and MAX6675s will set you back around $30.

In operation, it starts up and connects to my home wifi accesspoint, and then about every 8 seconds, the NodeMCU takes a reading and posts it to IO.Adafruit.com. This is webservice that allows datafeeds, achives the results, provides a way to make dashboards viewable from a computer, tablet, or smartphone.

Here is a dashboard on IO.Adafruit.com:
View attachment 230906

The "placeholder for stack" is a copy of the stovetop temp. One of these days, I'll add the Stack thermocouple and update the dashboard.

The top 'gauges' update in realtime as new readings are received. The upper graph shows Stovetop and Catalyst temperatures in the last hour and the bottom graph shows the same over the last 24hrs.

Above, you can see my first fire of the season buring a few odds and ends around 4PM today, which lasted about 4 hours when I reloaded. I added more wood on the reload and kept the thermostatic air control a little higher about an hour before that screenshot (you can see the jump to ~1000F when the cat relit and it started cruising).

Here is the same dashboard viewed on my phone, which works from my home wifi as well as when I'm on the road for work and want to check in on how the stove is burning.
View attachment 230907

I wanted a display where I could see the results from the livingroom, so I build a display in a cheap wood pictureframe using some ~0.6" LED segment 4-digit displays.

View attachment 230908 View attachment 230909

This sits on top a rolltop desk and can be seen from the livingroom, dining room, and kitchen due to my open floor plan.

It works by using another ESP8266 chip to connect to my home wifi and then connecting to my account on IO.Adafruit.com. When the sensor/sender unit uploads a new reading (every ~8 seconds), it gets pushed to the display unit and the values on the LEDs get updated. This is probably about another $25-30 in parts in 1-off Amazon order quantities.

The great thing about the 'display unit' is that as long as it has an internet connection, since the datafeed is on the 'cloud', it can be in my living room, my office across town, or anywhere else in the world with an internet connection.

I'm hesitant to share, as my code isn't streamlined or pretty and is basically just hacked and mashed up example code. But it works for me. And this setup is incredibly stable.

This is my first time doing any kind of 'microcontroller' based projects, and while a little intimidating to jump into, its all pretty straightforward. One thing I've learned is that there are dozens of ways to do any part of this and another way could be a better fit for your needs. But this one is working well for me.

If there is interest, I'll post more details, parts lists, and pros and cons of the setup vs some alternatives, and some next steps I'm considering.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading and I'd love to hear from others who have done anything similar or are looking to!

Ryan

Hi Ryan,
Would you mind sharing your code? I appreciate it from one (newbie) coder to another!
thanks!

 

[begreen]

Here is the chart with a white background. Is this over multiple days?

 

[Dc31]

Let me add my 10 cents worth to this discussion. Just a little bit off-topic as I only monitor water and air temperatures. At one point, I used a type K thermocouple in the stack but haven’t used that in a few years now. My thermocouples are DS18B20 with a top limit of 100C. They are connected to Raspberry pi/pi’s with a neat little GUI program called node-red (nodered.org) doing all the work, no coding necessary. I have several pi’s scattered around town monitoring temperatures at places like the fire station, the community hall, the historical society, and even my neighbor’s OWB so that I can tend it when he is away.

These units, including the one on my boiler, all report their readings to an MQTT server on a raspberry pi in my basement. That pi serves up a dashboard showing the gauges and graphs for whatever I may want. See the attached images of the dashboards. This is all done without using any outside server, just uses the inet to transfer the data. By forwarding a port on my home router, I am able to view these dashboards from anywhere on the internet.

Node-red also includes capabilities for setting alarm points with notifications through whatever means you may want (text, push, email, etc.) You can turn on lights, activate relays, control smart outlets, most anything that you can imagine.

The key components here are the raspberry pi (any model will work) as it is capable of reading the one-wire sensors, the DS18B20 (about $2 each in quantity), the node-red program, and the MQTT server (https://randomnerdtutorials.com/how-to-install-mosquitto-broker-on-raspberry-pi/).

As I recall, using a K thermocouple with a pi requires an analog to digital converter. I haven’t researched it in depth but I expect someone has built a node-red node for a K thermocouple.