Microma is a Serbian company that makes award-winning geothermal heat pumps. The flagship model is called Warmatronic, it has a sleek design with a gray aluminium housing and a 5 inch touchscreen user interface which is, you guessed it, a built-in mikromedia 5 for Tiva.
User interfaces on HVAC units can provide some of the worst examples of user interface design. Tiny LCD screens with a few — but not enough — buttons to navigate dozens of menus, settings and subsettings for various operating modes. It’s a nightmare of random short and long presses, and combinations of both. Pilots have an easier time preparing a jet for take-off.
Microma’s Warmatronic is just the opposite. Their engineers realized that people these days have high expectations from their screens and menus. It’s all those apps on smartphones and tablets that raised the bar. Ideally, one should be able to workout everything without even looking at a manual.
This insight lead to the decision to build in a large touchscreen interface and to use the real-estate in the best possible way. Hence, the Warmatronic’s user interface is now based on mikromedia 5 for Tiva, with the menu designed in VisualTFT.
And with that, everything else that’s great about the system comes into the forefront. Geothermal heat pumps are one of the most environmentally friendly ways to warm up or cool down your living space. In the summer the earth is cooler than the surrounding air, in the winter it’s the other way around. Heat pumps let you tap into this difference. With them, up to 75% of the generated thermal energy is free, substantially cutting heating bills.
Cool stuff.
Or hot, depending on the season.
Yours sincerely,
MikroElektronika