sensors Article Low-Cost Conversion of Single-Zone HVAC Systems to Multi-Zone Control Systems Using Low-Power Wireless Sensor Networks Julio Antonio Jornet-Monteverde 1 and Juan José Galiana-Merino 1,2,* 1 Department of Physics, Systems Engineering and Signal Theory, University of Alicante, Crta. San Vicente del Raspeig, s/n, 03080 Alicante, Spain;
[email protected] 2 University Institute of Physics Applied to Sciences and Technologies, University of Alicante, Crta. San Vicente del Raspeig, s/n, 03080 Alicante, Spain * Correspondence: juanjo@dfists.ua.es; Tel.: +34-965-909-636 Received: 31 May 2020; Accepted: 25 June 2020; Published: 27 June 2020 Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach to convert a conventional house air conditioning installation into a more efficient system that individually controls the temperature of each zone of the house through Wi-Fi technology. Each zone regulates the air flow depending on the detected temperature, providing energy savings and increasing the machine performance. Therefore, the first step was to examine the communication bus of the air conditioner and obtain the different signal codes. Thus, an alternative Controller module has been designed and developed to control and manage the requests on the communication bus (Bus–Wi-Fi gateway). A specific circuit has been designed to adapt the signal of the serial port of the Controller with the communication bus. For the acquisition of the temperature and humidity data in each zone, a Node module has been developed, which communicates with the Controller through the Wi-Fi interface using the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol with Secure Sockets Layer / Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates.