---
title: Building a Better Thermostat
osem_url: https://osem.seagl.org/conferences/seagl2017/program/proposals/263
beginning: '2017-10-07T10:45:00.000-07:00'
end: '2017-10-07T11:35:00.000-07:00'
presenters:
- name: Matthew Treinish
  affiliation: IBM
  osem_url: https://osem.seagl.org/users/570
  gravatar_id: e10107da509156651ba509ef7ade6d97
  biography: Matthew has been working on and contributing to Open Source software
    for most of his career. He has been primarily contributing to OpenStack since
    2012 and is a former member of the OpenStack TC (Technical Committee) and was
    previously the PTL (project technical lead) of the OpenStack community's QA program
    from OpenStack's Juno development cycle in 2014 through the Mitaka development
    cycle in 2016. He is a core contributor for several OpenStack projects and a member
    of the OpenStack Stable Maintenance Team. Matthew currently works for IBM's Developer
    Advocacy team working to make Open Source software better for everyone. He has previously
    been a speaker at OpenStack summits, LinuxCons Japan, China, and North America,
    OpenWest, FOSSASIA, PyConAU's OpenStack miniconf, and linux.conf.au.
---

After returning from a recent trip that occurred during the middle of a heat wave. I arrived home to find my apartment quite hot, at least 45C inside. Needless to say it wasn’t the most comfortable way to come home after 15 days out of town, I decided it was time for me to do something about it to address this so I didn't come home to that unpleasant surprise again. Normally, this problem is solved by having a thermostat which controls the air conditioning. However, my apartment did not have a thermostat. So I decided to build one using open source software.

This talk will cover how I went about solving my problem using existing software and protocols like home-assistant, MQTT, and also some new software that was created for this. It'll also discuss how using open software and home automation I was able to solve my issue but also make cooling my apartment smarter.
