Issues
My landlord won't let me install a smart thermostat
The "Dumb" thermostat does a good job of regulating temperature just the living room
Weather in Kansas
I kept having to wake up multiple night, freezing or drenched in sweat, having to walk to the living room to turn it up/down/on/off/strange/charm
Cue trying to solve everything with microcontrollers
Phase 1
Figure out what my preferred temperature range is.
I reworked some existing code to get a DHT22 Temp + Humidity Sensor working with an ESP8266. I'm a huge fan of the ESP + PlatformIO + Arduino + Clion combo. The ESP was setup as an HTTP server that would respond to a GET request with temperature/humidity data. They establish a static IP in my local network and then port-forwarded to no-ip's DDNS service.
Tangent
Two summer ago (@June 1, 2018) I built what was essentially a "Hey, it's cooler outside than in your bedroom, maybe open a window?" sensor. ESP8266 that checked the temperature in my bedroom, compared it to openweather data and sent me a notification via IFTTT.
I setup a Google Sheet with a script on a trigger to hit that URL at a certain interval and append those values to the sheet. It seemed like the faster way to collect that data and it offered a really convenient way to change the poll rate/ turn it off.
Also used it to log CO2 PPM levels at some point.
Phase 2
I setup another http server on an ESP8266 to get a value from a GET request param and pass that to a servo. This meant I could reuse this code fairly easy on other projects, testing could be done with a browser (wasn't about to teach postman to my roommate) and calibration could be done without recompiling and reuploading code.
This worked! I still had to wake up in the middle of the night, but I didn't have to walk unto the living room anymore. Also it helped me with really nailing out that comfortable temperature range before I moved to phase 3.
Phase 3 coming soon :)