New blog post: Integrated our air conditioners into #HomeAssistant with #ESPHome and a light bit of equipment hacking to integrate it tidily.

Details and good photos included.

https://michd.me/blog/integrating-our-air-conditioners-into-home-assisstant/

#esp32

Integrating our Air Conditioners into Home Assistant - MichD

I added Home Assistant control to our air conditioner units. It involved PCB design, some 3D printing, equipment modification, and ESPHome.

Not content with what I wrote up here, I decided to take it a bit further. Why not replace the PCB carrying the infrared receiver with a custom one that has an ESP32 module right on board?

Fingers crossed I can actually get it programmed; so far I've never used ESP32 modules outside of a pre-made development board.

#esp32 #HomeAssistant #ESPHome

Today's fun: replacing the A/C Wifi control hack I wrote up here: https://michd.me/blog/integrating-our-air-conditioners-into-home-assisstant/ with a much cleaner approach: a purposely designed circuit board.

Ripping out this patched up board + wire mess + 3D printed box and replacing it with a simple board felt much like code refactoring and deleting. Very satisfying.

#ESPHome #HomeAssistant #ESP32

Integrating our Air Conditioners into Home Assistant - MichD

I added Home Assistant control to our air conditioner units. It involved PCB design, some 3D printing, equipment modification, and ESPHome.

@MichDdev Awesome to see. Reminds me a bit of @revk 's method of doing his Dakin units - https://www.revk.uk/2022/04/new-air-con-part-2.html
New air-con, part 2

Again, not actually blogging on the system as a whole - it is impressive, but not finished until next week. One aspect of the system is the ...

@welbymcroberts @revk Cheers! Oh yeah that looks quite similar. Seems like that Daikin "smart" stuff has exactly all the problems I wanted to avoid by cheaping out off the optional bits for the Fujitsu system. Cloud-required control is a big yikes.
@MichDdev @welbymcroberts Yeh, just adding HA config MQTT messages now.
@MichDdev omg! Amazing I need to do this with our Fujitsu heatpump!
@chris Thanks! Well hopefully the post helps with that :D
@MichDdev welcome to the club! I seem to have lucked out and not needing too much pain (besides chip shortage and a couple of mistakes) on my LG one: https://flameeyes.blog/tag/lg-pqrcuds0/
LG PQRCUDS0 – Flameeyes's Weblog

Posts about LG PQRCUDS0 written by Flameeyes

Flameeyes's Weblog

@flameeyes Oh wow, that's a heck of a journey. It's late here so I only quickly skimmed through, but I really appreciate the depth of the reverse engineering here. I feel like I lucked out with everything being already there in ESPHome, so nothing too in-depth was required to make it work. 🙂

That said, you know it's a fun project if you get to bust out the logic analyzer, right?

@MichDdev oh hey, I recognize that remote! I've been using Broadlinks to automate my Fujitsu mini splits, but I'll have to read your post and see what ideas I could steal

@jetpacmonkey The main idea here can be condensed to "stick a homemade esphome broadlink inside the unit and power it by stealing power from the unit" :D

I am however, not done...