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Re:1980s computer controls Grand Rapids Public School heat a... by drzaiusapelord on Friday June 12, 2015 @01:39PM (#9707376)
Its not the code that's concerning, its the hardware. The idea that they never bothered to virtualize or emulate this in 30 years says a lot about how IT is run at that school.

A single developer could emulate whatever IO goes to that radio and have it controlled by a simple computer with redundancy. I wonder what they're paying the original developer to maintain this turkey. I imagine he's charging enough to where the sunk cost fallacy is obvious here.

What I find interesting is all the places where FOSS is lacking. There doesn't seem to be a popular and well managed FOSS climate control system. Is anyone making standardized controllers, thermostats, etc? This stuff should be a commodity by now. I'm guessing its hard to work with all the proprietary HVAC stuff and its also an unsexy problem to solve. I'd love to replace my thermostat with a raspberry pi and have a lot of fun modern features. There's a hackaday article about someone doing this, but its a pretty primitive project.

Re:1980s computer controls Grand Rapids Public School heat a... by dnfehren on Friday June 12, 2015 @02:03PM (#9707549)
There are some projects to start bring FOSS ideas/ideals to building system controls and decision making like this, but I think there are significant difficulties in the variety of proprietary systems and reluctance to change due to capital costs and/or maintenance contracts.

https://github.com/VOLTTRON/volttron from Pacific Northwest National Lab is one example.

Re:1980s computer controls Grand Rapids Public School heat a... by amk_ on Saturday June 13, 2015 @01:20AM (#9709988)
> Is anyone making standardized controllers, thermostats, etc?

http://www.bacnet.org/