Water Heating Controlled by a Classic 150

[ruarangifarm]

Yes, Arduino rings a bell but I've never touched one.
It might be time to do so.
Cheers

[MattM]

 Go visit Micro Center or Fry's.  They have many different kid.  You probably want the project kit around $120 I believe.

[OperaHouse]

I would avoid spending more than $10 for one.  Get a clone for $7 from China shipped.  It will take 2 weeks to get and in the meantime download the development system and try to compile a very small program.  If you can't download the developer and get something to compile there is no sense in ordering a board. Everyone wants to add displays wifi and everything else to one and that is a serious misuse.   You quickly run out of pins to do anything useful.  I have two blinking LED for status on my entire house system.  These are for nice simple stand alone tasks. 

[MattM]

The project kit is a package of boards and components.  Its meant to be useful in multiple projects .

[dgd]

...
  Everyone wants to add displays wifi and everything else to one and that is a serious misuse.   You quickly run out of pins to do anything useful.  I have two blinking LED for status on my entire house system.  These are for nice simple stand alone tasks.

Hmmm... maybe so for the lowest spec arduinos with just 2k or so of ram - the UNO and nano etc.. ideal for simple tasks, but they can be used to implement higher computing functions such as data analysis, simple graphics, ethernet, web serving etc.. 'serious misuse' I think not.. maybe challenging but entertaining to get the C++ code tight and efficient to run and run fast.

OK, the better spec Mega or DUE can do some serious computing and web servers, wifi, multiple serial IO, better data storage methods are all easily implemented because of the additional ram, program flash etc.

In any case ruarangifarm would have a significant learning curve to reach a stage where an Arduino system could achieve the water heating management.

[OperaHouse]

Yea, like I said serious misuse.

[DamonHD]

I am currently in the situation where for the remote IoT sensor/control modules we're developing the radio/comms embedded CPU, or even sometimes the sensor embedded CPU, is often considerably more powerful than the ATMega328P that we're using as our 'main' CPU, but each time that happens there has to be a good reason IMHO, else the design is unbalanced and dogs are being wagged by tails.  If you need Internet then you should use something more like a Raspberry Pi.  If you want very low power, simple sensors and output controls, and a couple of LEDs for output then Arduino UNO is more like it.  Don't mix them and end up unhappy.

Rgds

Damon