Smart home / Connected ventilation product

Smart Ventilation System Development: Electronics, Firmware And App

Electronics, firmware, app and cloud for a connected ventilation unit with heat recovery.

Cylindrical Prana ventilation unit with a round front display, shown beside a white IR remote control and a smartphone displaying a Wi-Fi symbol.

The opportunity

A next generation to redesign

For Prana Platinum, the electronics, firmware, sensor architecture and user experience all had to be redesigned, with open hardware questions at the start.

They thought through the product architecture holistically and brought solutions we had not anticipated.

Volodymyr BundzyloHead of IT Department & Lead Design Engineer, Prana

The solution

A full R&D partner

Indeema chose the architecture on ESP32-C6, wrote the multi-task firmware, integrated sensors and four control channels, and extended the existing ThingsBoard cloud.

01Hardware architecture
02Firmware
03Sensors
04Control channels
05App and cloud

Block diagram with a phone connected over Wi-Fi to a unit containing power management, a control module, a core processing unit and sensor arrays A and B.

The impact

What changed for the product

Open hardware questionsDefined architecture on ESP32-C6
Single way to control the unitApp, IR remote, Matter and physical controls
Filter not identifiedAutomatic filter identification
No self-diagnosticsSelf-diagnostics and service views

Indeema continues to support hardware revisions, firmware and sensor-driver updates.

Engineering judgement

Decisions that shaped the product

ESP32-C6

Chosen for its native support of Wi-Fi 6, BLE 5.3, Matter, Thread and Zigbee, which removes the need for additional connectivity co-processors.

Separate power for motors and electronics

Dedicated motor supplies and isolated MCU and sensor rails keep motor switching noise away from measurements, and per-channel current sensing feeds diagnostics.

Explicit state machine

Operating modes run as a state machine with defined transitions; the app detects schedule conflicts and notifies the user.

Micro-switch filter coding

A micro-switch matrix in the filter shaft lets firmware identify the filter at start-up, load the matching control algorithm and start lifetime tracking.