tado° is the European market leader for smart products and services to manage your energy consumption and control your climate at home. Our mission is to help households save energy and drive forward the green energy transition in Europe. We are internationally recognized for our excellent user experience, our unmatched compatibility, our award-winning elegant hardware design, and for being truly open with major smart home platforms. Over 200 employees from 45 nations contribute every day to the success of our company, share their ideas, and are part of a dynamic and highly professional value chain. We want to make a difference, challenge our business every day, and find new colleagues who are just as passionate about our products as we are!

Role

We are looking for a tech-savvy, detail-oriented, and driven individual to join our Heat Pump Team and drive the digitization of heat pumps. If you have a passion for tinkering and a love for technology, this role is perfect for you.

As a member of our team, you will be responsible for various tasks that enhance the compatibility, features, and performance of our heat pump products. You will delve into the inner workings of heat pumps, understand their communication protocols and control mechanisms, and ensure their seamless integration into the tado° ecosystem to unlock further energy savings for our customers.

Responsibilities

• You will connect to heat pump data buses and examine their digital communication protocols to understand, communicate with, control, and describe the functionalities of heat pumps from manufacturers such as Vaillant, Atlantic, Daikin, and others.
• Your main responsibility will be to analyze internal heat pump communication, specifically interpreting electrical signals, translating them into bits and bytes, and converting this data into meaningful information packets, also known as telegrams.
• Based on your findings, you will design control concepts for heat pumps, which your colleagues will develop into firmware drivers. You will support this development with your expertise and test the resulting drivers.
• Your work will involve using resources such as oscilloscopes, data logs, data analysis tools, and heat pump documentation. You will also collaborate closely with colleagues and customers to test and validate your ideas and assumptions.
• To excel in this role, you should have a hacker mentality, enjoying tinkering and experimenting with ideas to see what works. You will need persistence and patience, as the job includes working across all layers: from electrical signals, to bits and bytes, to telegrams, and finally to control mechanisms.
• Additionally, you will occasionally help specify and test new product features, analyze product performance based on field data, interact with customers in third-level support, and approve software updates. You will also consolidate knowledge from different development teams and support product management with technical expertise on heat pumps and product details.

Sneak Peek

This position requires a meticulous and structured approach to understanding and documenting how things work at the most fundamental level. You'll excel in conducting detailed and prolonged measurements and data analysis.

For example, consider this log data from a heat pump:

"1717452373.63,02 96 01 3C 01 5D 02 00 7D 02 95 68 00 14 40 F0 31 01 CB 14 01 B0 15 10 01 14 08 2C 1C 1D 13 23 33 43 00 2B 00 F0 35 77 01 0E 78 01 01 79 01 27 FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF 56 13 23 33 43 00 14 40 F0 35 FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF 6B 13 23 33 43 00 1C 00 F0 36 00 00 C8 00 01 00 F0 00 02 00 00 01 03 00 2C 01 04 00 2C 01 98"

From this, we can extract the following telegram sent on the heat pump's bus:

"2024-06-04 00:06:13 |060 | | 00 F0 36 | 00 00 C8 00 01 00 F0 00 02 00 00 01 03 00 2C 01 04 00 2C 01"

Through advanced reverse engineering, we know that this telegram is sent from the heat pump's main controller ("00 F0 36") and reports the “Domestic Hot Water Reheat Setpoint” ("03 00") at 30°C ("2C 01").

Does discovering such details excite you? If so, we’d love to talk to you, as these tasks will form the core of your responsibilities.