GainSpan announces reference design for Wi-Fi thermostat

SAN JOSE, USA: GainSpan Corporation has announced the Wi-Fi Thermostat Application Development Kit (ADK), a complete reference design for a thermostat with wireless connectivity. Connected thermostats can be accessed locally from a PC or smartphone, or from the cloud via an infrastructure network.

This ADK is also an excellent starting point for development of Smart Thermostats that adjust to homeowner usage patterns, thermal characteristics of the home and outside temperature, helping lower home heating and cooling bills and saving energy.

The Wi-Fi Thermostat ADK includes thermostat hardware, complete hardware design package and software suite with reference source code for the thermostat embedded application and iOS and Android based mobile applications.

The iOS and Android mobile applications allow users to set heat and cool temperature targets, set time, view relative humidity and program temperature settings that can be applied to weekdays, weekends or selected days of the week. Settings can be saved into four pre-defined profiles and each can be programmed individually.

In addition to the ADK, a Wi-Fi Thermostat Application Evaluation Kit (AEK) is also available that provides a binary version of the software and can be used to evaluate and demonstrate smart thermostat operation.

The thermostat ADK is based on a GainSpan GS1011M Wi-Fi module interfacing to a Renesas RL78L13 host microcontroller (MCU), along with temperature and humidity sensors. The Wi-Fi module and MCU communicate over SPI, using AT commands.

The GainSpan embedded software offers complete Wi-Fi functionality and networking stack and services, wireless security and provisioning software. It supports mDNS/DNS-SD based device and service discovery, allowing users to automatically discover and connect to the thermostat.

Communication between the MCU and the smartphone application is based on HTTP REST APIs. The GSLink feature provided as a part of the Serial-to-Wi-Fi software allows translation of XML over HTTP into a format that can be easily parsed by the MCU.

In addition, the embedded application includes provisioning software that allows configuration of the Wi-Fi module in Limited AP or Client modes, and provides over-the-air firmware upgrades.

The Wi-Fi Thermostat ADK allows developers to add application software and services, and customize the end product's user interface. The reference source code included in the kit provides a very fast time-to-market and lets customers rapidly build custom features suited to their end applications.