AcTricker

Im working in an openspace of 15 peoples and most of us are very cold. There is one thermostat for the whole openspace with the actual temperature display on it but it seems we cannot change the desired temperature… We complain several times to our management about it and after some time the responsible of the amenities comes and explains us the situation. The temperature is set by the landlord for the whole building and the sensor in our openspace is just to detect the temperature in our space to open air vent or not. In other word…there is nothing they can do about it, is it? 

This is the AcTricker! The solution to our problem 😉

It’s design to be put against the wall around the temperature sensor. It will create a cold micro climate around the sensor to trick it thinking that the office is cold and thus never start the AC in our openspace. It works with a Peltier device that generate cold inside the enclosure and Hot outside of the enclosure when a current is passing (I did not research how/why it is work but just use it as is).

The Peltier device is in sandwich with the hot face facing outside with a big heatsink/fan to dissipate the heat and the cold side facing in the enclosure with a smaller heatsink/fan. It is important to dissipate the heat/cold quickly otherwise the Peltier become inefficient. It would had been enough to stop here and the device would had been functional nevertheless I wanted to add more functionalities… 

The whole system is control with an android application with Bluetooth so people can check what is the simulated temperature inside the enclosure and act on it by stopping the Peltier device and fans. The brain of the whole system on the device side is an Arduino micro (small size). It is connected to a Bluetooth modem and a temperature/humidity sensor (DHT22/RHT03) for data exchange. There is also 2 MOSFET to control the fans and 1 static relay to control the Peltier device. 

The android application allows to retrieve Temperature and Humidity and control the fans and Peltier. The application design is very similar to the one I created for previous project (like this one) and use the BT of android to communicate with the device so i will not details again here. The Arduino side is also very similar to previous projects (same one than the app). Here is the system after it is plug (android screen capture on the right and device on the left) :

and the result 10 minutes after:

We reduce the temperature from 23 degrees Celsius to 19 degrees Celsius leading the AC to completely stop 😉

Code is on my bitbucket repo.

Improvement idea: Have the Arduino automatically stopping the Peltier/fan when the temperature inside is low enough to save power and reduce noise. 

Static Relay ??

I used a static relay for the Peltier device after burning 2 MOSFETs when trying to control the Peltier with them. The MOSFET were becoming very hot very quick and even damage the breadboard as you can see on the picture

At the beginning, I was not sure why the MOSFET was becoming so hot. I know that the Peltier device use lot of current (around 7A) but the MOSFET I used (P16NF06FP) should had been OK since it was able to handle load up to 11A (I use the TO-220FP package which is plastic package and thus dissipate less heat than the metal package):

After some research (and particularly this blog post) I think the explanation is that the MOSFET was not able to handle 11A with my configuration. I was driving the MOSFET from the Arduino with a voltage of 5V but the MOSFET require more voltage to be fully open. I was thus not able to use the full MOSFET capability due to a gate voltage too low. The impact of the gate voltage (Vgs) on the possible current output (Id) is also in the datasheet:

As you can see if we switch the Gate voltage from 5V to the recommended 10V the current we can drain grow from 7A to more than 28A.

This is why the MOSFET was become too hot and unusable. I should have bought a MOSFET design to be driven with a gate voltage more compatible with Arduino like the IRL540.