Basics

The Warm Church system runs on a Raspberry Pi which is a single board computer running the Linux operating system. It has no moving parts so is quiet and reliable. Sitting on top of the Pi is a custom designed board which provides the following facilities:

• Two relays (switches) which can be used to control the central heating
• A battery backed real time clock, as the Pi doesn’t have a clock built in
• A 1-wire interface that may be used to talk to temperature sensors

Attached to the Pi is a wireless controller used to communicate with wireless “meshnet” sensors which can be used for measuring temperature and/or humidity. You can have as many of these as you like. The readings from them will be averaged out to give an “average” temperature of the building.

If your church doesn’t have wifi then we can install a mobile data link that connects the system to the internet so that it can download your calendar data.

Finally, the warm church controller creates a private “ad hoc” network that you can use to configure and monitor it via a web browser on your lap top or phone. This only has to be done once, when you set it up.