Pools have come a long way. It used to be you had a pump and if you were lucky it had a mechanical timer switch on it. That was it. Now you have digital controllers and spa jets and heaters. You can even get them that connect to your home automation system. If your pool isn’t new enough to do that already, you can get a range of add-on accessories. For a price. [Rob] paid $500 to get a remote for his pool. It wasn’t even WiFi, just a simple RF remote. In 3 years, the transmitter had burned out ($300 to replace) and he decided he had enough. For $20, [Rob] added MQTT control and monitoring to his pool using an ESP8266. You can see the video description of the project below.
Naturally, the instructions are a bit specific to the Pentair system he has. However, it isn’t as specialized as you might think. The project relies on the connection for a wired “spa-side remote” that most modern pool systems support. The electrical connections for these aren’t quite standard, but they are all very similar, so you have a good chance of reproducing this for your setup assuming you have a connection for one of these wired remotes.
The remote has a few buttons and LED for status. The LED reacts differently depending on the pool’s current mode, so connecting there not only gives you control but also allows you to provide some limited status. It isn’t going to let you monitor pump currents or anything exotic, but it is a simple place to gain access. Using the Arduino pulse input function makes it easy to sense if the LED is on, off, or blinking. Another sensor reads the water temperature. The controller makes it available, but it isn’t simple to read, so the project just reads the raw sensor voltage from the existing thermistor and computes the temperature.
[Ron] does a nice job of explaining some basic concepts like using opto-isolators. However, the real value to the video is the easy way to interface to the existing controller. A little configuration into Home Automation rounds out the project.
If you have an older system, you might like to see more of a pool system rebuild. If you are interested in controlling the pool chemistry, we’ve seen that before, too.