Programmable Thermostat w/ 2-week Schedule?

[micky]

I have a friend whose job is to change the oil on space ships.

Every 10,000 miles.

He can't find a job, however.

[Ed Pawlowski]

I don't think so. Simplicity matters. How many people had the time flashing on the VCR because they could not program it?

The vast majority of us work on a 7 day schedule. Giving the option for more would confuse a lot of people, more than would benefit from it. Can you see the reviews? I bought a new XYZ thermostat but it is too hard to program and very confusing.

Before this thread, how many times have you heard of people needing a 14 day program? First time for me.

[Ralph Mowery]

Where I worked I could tell you of about 1500 people that could use a 30 day program.

If one can not program a 30 day one, doubtful they could even program a one day one.

[Scott Lurndal]

Responding to rants from Home Moaners Hub again. Sigh.

Thermostats don't use flash, there is no need for that much memory. There are very small non-volatile rams built in to the embedded microprocessor chips that are used for those applications that store perhaps 512 bytes.

Cost vs. benefit. For the five people in the world that a 7-day schedule won't suit, they're not about to place a memory chip that costs

10x the simple low-power embedded processor chip in volume.

[Scott Lurndal]

The microcontroller in your thermostat costs less than a dime in quantity, takes up much less PCB space, requires significantly less programming and doesn't require production on an advanced node (e.g. 180nm is sufficient, no need for a 3nm fab).

[Ed Pawlowski]

OK, 1500 out of 330 million. 4.541326067211626e-4%

Yes, you are right, many cannot program a 1 day one.

[angelica...]

Although that sample size is adequate for statistical analysis, it is not randomly selected, so any conclusions drawn from it are... limited, at best.

Cindy Hamilton

[trader_4]

That's where I was coming from when the poster claimed that the market would be bigger for the two week model. I would think a whole lot of people would see two week programming and view it as more complicated, something they don't need and harder to program. Not that it's really true that it's harder to program, could be just one step where you have a choice of one week or two week schedule. But seeing it on the box, I bet a lot of people would say it's not for me, even if it was the same price. Would be interesting though for a manufacturer to offer it in a model and see what happens. I would make it one, two, three or four week programmable at that point.

[trader_4]

Who says flash only comes in large sizes? There are lots of microcontrollers using flash that have only 100KB or less of flash memory. that can be used for code and non-volatile data.

That's illogical too. Cheap non-volatile memory is available today, They might not even need to change the hardware, there could be enough memory to store another week already there, unused. And even if not, it's pennies more.