not a school project. climate needs to be controlled from heat output of lcd and outside ambient temp/cold. hence why i need to have a heater and chiller unit.

You have some extremely capable people trying to help you, but you are not helping yourself. You are not providing a usable description of what you want to accomplish. They ask questions and you give inadequate answers. You have some ideas that you can't implement, but won't provide the experts here (not me, by the way) with the facts they need to help you.

Forget about they way you think it should be done, and simply state the problem, the constraints, and the desired outcome. Unless, of course, you want to do it your way or no way. No offense intended, but I have to wonder if your boss has the same concerns.

 

Definitely starting from scratch. This way, to reach anything practical, this thread is going to take a lot of posting.

Help others to help you.

 

Let's start with the black box. What are its dimensions? Approximations are OK. What are the walls made of? (You mentioned aluminum, but is it insulated at all?) How much electrical power is flowing into the box - just the typical load of a 19" LCD, whatever that is? Ignore the heating and cooling apparatus itself, for now.

You have 120V AC mains power available for any heating or cooling you need to accomplish, right?

What are the environmental extremes you need to consider? And you haven't answered to issue of reliability. Living with 1% failure makes for a cheaper design than a 1ppm failure rate.

On a personal note, I'd be asking myself why my boss gave me a task I'm unqualified to accomplish. No offense, but we all have different skills and this project doesn't seem to fall within your skill set.

 

How about a different approach. You get to worry about how to heat and cool it.
We work out how to keep the temperature between 65 and 85 F?
So far simple. You are now a hardware designer. Post a link to your chiller or tell us the voltage and current or power it needs. We can get that one then worry about the heater.

 

I skipped over many posts, so sorry if this has alredy been suggested. I have a board that does everythign you've mentioned. It has a PIC microcontroller, a termperature sensor and an LCD display. The program for this is very simple, but you do need to know a little something about programming. For the rest, you just need to get data sheets for the components, and just read, read, read.

I've also done this with a commercial programmable thermostat. I've done all you've mentioned, with the exception of a touch screen controller. I was able to program the t-stat without that however.

 

These top secret projects never get anywhere in the forums and drag on forever. Worse when the OP doesn't seem to have the skills required to tackle or explain it.