Programmable Heating controller

[GoodFella]

The controller of my old Buderus (1990) oil heating broke down this year and i would like to replace it.
20 years ago i did some programming of PLCs in school, and i remember even the smallest task was a pain.
Do we have better tech nowadays to easen that task?
I d also love to program that from my pc and connect the heating controller in the basement via WLAN .. using a language like JavaScript or similar. asm just sucks.
What would you recommend?
Thank you in advance.

 

[ty_ger]

The Arduino IDE is super easy to use, there are a ton of different microcontrollers supported, and there are a ton of guides online. For WLAN, people often use something like an ESP32, get rid of its default firmware which is mostly unusable, and flash it to be compatible with the Arduino IDE. Again, there are guides-a-plenty. Only problem I've had with the ESP32 is that it tends to crash periodically or stop connecting to WiFi until you power-cycle it. It's kind of unreliable, so I would use the ESP32 just for WiFi communication/commands, and then serial connect it to a more reliable microcontroller to do the day-to-day operations based on its latest commands.

Edit: Oh, wait... There is also Raspberry PI options too, if you want something which is more of a PC experience. You can install Windows or Linux on a Raspberry PI, boot it up, set it up like a normal computer, create whatever network communication method you want, and then write a C program to control its general purpose IO pins based on whatever conditions you want. This is a more complicated method, but rewarding, and maybe easier if you already have a C brain (I don't and I struggled).

 

[Steevo]

There are also Boron controllers with LoRa 10 year subscriptions for Verizon that are cheap and have multiple PWM and I2C sensor I-O and RS232