The Eneco Toon is a thermostat by a Dutch power and gas company. It has a relatively large display for a thermostat and is also a touch screen. It let’s you view realtime information about your electricity and gas usage and can be controlled remotely if you subscibe to Eneco’s services… At least, that’s that Eneco want’s you to do.
I was looking for a thermostat that could be controlled remotely but I don’t need Eneco, Google or anyone else to know what the temperature in my living room is. Knowing I can root the Toon, I looked for one on Marktplaats and picked one up for a fair price. It’s the first version, so it’s a bit slow.
To root it, you need to open up the Toon and connect some wires. Opening the thing up is easy to do by prying the front bezels apart from the body with your fingers. You can use a serial adapter or connect the JTAG pins to a Raspberry Pi. The latter is more preferred because I’m lazy, someone wrote a script to automatically root it and I had a Raspberry Pi ready to go.
After connecting the wires using a diagram I found online, my desk looked like this:
The script ran without any problems, luckely. I now had root access to the Toon. Cool!
Some people over at Domoticaforum have spent a lot of time and effort developing apps for the Toon, and they can be downloaded to a rooted Toon using the ToonStore. So I tried installing the Toon store. A link to a recent version couldn’t be found easily.
A few days later, Eneco came out with an update. Using the upgrade script that was created by the community I updated my Toon. That script also installed the ToonStore, so that was great.
Now all I had to do is put it back together, cut the wire between my thermostat and the boiler. Put the ‘Ketel module’ in between. Hang the Toon and try it out.
Yay! It works! Now what?
I installed this unofficial app to control the Toon from my phone and installed some apps and activated some subscription only features. Somehow, the weather app isn’t working. But anything else seems to work fine.
After all this was some great fun and I now have a Linux box I can SSH into that controls the heat in my apartment. Not that I really need it, Even with very low temperatures outside the inside temperature easily reaches 20 C, which is great for my gas bill, but doesn’t really justify the Toon. :)