More information about vegetable oil burner technology and installation for Yellow Heat burners is available at https://www.yellowheat.com/
This monitoring system is designed to display current fuel level, record and display historical consumption of vegetable oil fuel, and display burner status.
When the burner turns on or off, the device records the current fuel level. The monitoring device sends this data to the database. Cloud functions calculate fuel consumption when new data is posted in the database. The cross-platform app allows users to configure the monitoring device over bluetooth and displays current fuel level, total consumption, and historical usage. The cloud functions also provide notifications to the user and optionally to the fuel vendor when fuel level drops below a specificied point.
The Yellow Heat monitoring device is built on an ESP32 microcontroller. The ESP32 is a low-cost, low-power system on a chip (SoC) series with Wi-Fi & dual-mode Bluetooth capabilities.
The device is powered with 110VAC converted to 12DC with a RECOM power supply (RAC02-12SGB). This is stepped down to 5V with an LM2596 DC to DC Buck Converter to power the ESP32 board. The 12V also powers the fuel level sensor.
Fuel level is measured with a Rochester 6860 magnetic liquid-level gauge. With an operating current of 7-8mA at VCC 12V, the guage returns an output of 0.5V - 4.5V. This is converted to a maximum of 3.3V using a voltage divider and indicates fuel level on pin 33.
Burner status (on/off) is measured using another LM2596 DC to DC Buck Converter which converts the 24V signal to 3.3V (HIGH) on pin 18.
The firmware is developed with Mongoose OS, an IoT Firmware Development Framework with Over-The-Air firmware updates and remote management, built in flash encryption, a device management dashboard service, and the ability to code in C or JavaScript.
Download this repository:
$ git clone https://github.com/a-pasquale/yellow-heat.git; cd yellow-heat
Build the firmware and flash the device:
$ mos build --platform esp32
$ mos flash
The Mongoose OS dashboard for debugging is very helpful:
$ mos ui
A cross-platform Ionic App allows users to monitor burner stats, fuel level, and view history. The Ionic framework enables developers to build cross-platform apps in one codebase with the web technologies including Typescript, HTML, and SCSS.
More information about the app is available at https://github.com/a-pasquale/yellow-heat-app.
These functions calculate total fuel use for the burner and store the current burner status and fuel level. The functions also provide notifications to the user when fuel level drops too low and optionally to the vendor to deliver more fuel.
More information about the cloud functions is available at https://github.com/a-pasquale/yellow-heat-firebase-functions.