Welcome to floor-heating-proportional-valve Discussions!

[nliaudat]

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[fabianmuehlberger]

Hi,
I recently started working on an open source smart radiator valve and someone on the ESPHome discord pointed out, that you are working on one. I already did some designing and testing, but I am currently in design and evaluation phase. If you are interested in collaborating to this idea, let me know.
From what I can see, your project and components are very similar, if you like I would love to exchange design ideas, validate and compare.
https://github.com/fabianmuehlberger/OpenValve
Best Fabian

[fabianmuehlberger]

Hey,
hope you're making progress in your development, and thank you for your feedback.
I had similar issues with my design and the n20 300/1 gearbox motor not having a fun time with 3.3 V.
After a long time on the interwebs I finally found a motor specifically made for this application, it's a canned stepper with a 10/1 gearbox and linear travel of 5mm. For ~ 6 euro a piece.
If you are interested, I let you know when they arrive, and I had a chance of testing them.

Best
Fabian

[nliaudat]

Hi Alex,
Stepper motors are more complicated to run and cost a lot.
I've seen valve actuators which use a traditional motor and an opto encoder to achieve the same result.
Absolute position feedback is not needed, but for the price of a simple opto sensor you can get absolute position as the total movement is less than 5mm.

I have tested all the following solutions

and the best is opto sensor as there is no contact, so no wear nor oxidation.

You can also make an accurate DC motor with opto sensors : https://www.hackster.io/adamb314/super-accurate-300-robot-arm-15f1d2

Regards

[Tecnologic]

I want to keep it hardware wise as simple as possible. The current waveform of the brushed DC motor of the vdmot valve gives a spike at every communication of the brushed. I count these spikes to have an incremental encoder. To reference the drive I use the closed position. Just need to integrate that in esphome and test it with my heating valve array.

[nliaudat]

The question is : do we really need precision in the position of the valve? My philosophy in central heating solution is to generate small movements of the valve according to the temperature difference in order to obtain the ideal level by increments with a fairly short time interval. And it works! In my opinion, the information on the endstops is sufficient, But if you're going to create a new valve actuator, that's well to include an absolute position at a moderate cost.

[Tecnologic]

I'm totally with U there. That's why I asked about the absolute position measurement/battery need for the current implementation. On my desk with a valve without water my implementation works as I want it. There may be slight drift in the absolute position due to start/stop of the motor. But that can be fixed easily by cyclic reference after X moves or a time interval.

[nliaudat]

I've tested the valve with https://github.com/nliaudat/esp32_8ch_motor_shield and it's working with additionnal spring on axle.