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Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch

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Re: Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch

#231

Post by rich_sasha »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #108

I installed AC in my home in the last year. I specifically went for units that were IR controlled rather than any proprietary smart B.S. For the smarts, I used cheap IR blasters from AliExpress and hooked them up to HomeAssistant. I just mounted cheap Lenovo tablets to the wall to do the room-dashboard thing to allow controlling lights/AC without a phone. These kind of horror stories only serve to reinforce my decisi…

Ah, do you have some tips for someone who wants to do something similar?

I use AC units that come with IR remotes (Samsung maybe??) but the timers don't work for some reason. It would be great to hand roll some automation, but I never "hacked" IR remote/receiver systems.

Re: Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch

#232

Post by hellweaver666 »

I had a similar situation with my shutter blinds. The company wanted €500 to install a "smart hub" to enable voice control instead of their little remote. To hell with that, I ordered a couple of servos and an esp8266 and 3d printed some little fingers that would press the buttons on the remote and added the whole thing to HomeAssistant via ESPHome. Cost me less than €30.

Re: Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch

#233

Post by torginus »

pzlarsson wrote: post #120
datahack wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think this is bad? Try swimming pool equipment.

I think home EV charging equipment is heading in the same direction as well. Very few have local and open APIs and instead depend on the vendors cloud service for control.

I am confused - aren't these boxes basically fancy three phase outlets? They probably have some safety fuses and some comms equipment, but the 'core' of the system is basically copper wire that connects you to the grid.

Re: Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch

#234

Post by snickmy »

This post well summarises everything that is wrong with the current domotic / home automation space.

You either waste a tons of money on consumer grade product, and spend even more when they break, or you become a domain expert, hacking your way through it and running HomeAssistant (or similar)

Re: Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch

#235

Post by TeMPOraL »

muppetman wrote: post #210
zeroflow wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm offering you a different viewpoint: They made the analysis, how long the flash will live and saw, that it will make it out of the warranty period. Thus they did not opt for more durable and expensive flash and/or software change. I've seen this myself before. One process step before release of the control module was a write cycle analysis to make sure the unit will live for at least 10 years (i think) before the…

Isn't that kinda the definition of planned obselence? You plan so that past you point you have to care, it could well die/become useless?

Planned obsolescence is when you purposefully design it to fail as soon as possible (but past any warranty period), to force repeat purchase.

Re: Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch

#236

Post by ozfive »

There are so many companies that I am sure countless individuals have come along and have solved a problem for themselves that many other customers probably have. These solutions hardly ever surface.

I for one was upset when I bought a HiFi amp from Cambridge Audio (CXA-81) and it came with an IR controller. The only way to be able to control that amp through the app is by means of a DAC which costs another couple of thousand dollars. I refused to accept this as my solution. I wrote a web server that used a Raspberry Pi Zero W and an IR transmitter along with a rudimentary Android app that had a series of buttons which corresponded to the functionalities I needed.

If anyone is interested the web server (written in Go) that the Android app talks to is located here https://github.com/ozfive/CXA81-IR-Remote-Server

I will upload the the Android app source in the next week.

Re: Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch

#237

Post by amiga-workbench »

lintfordpickle wrote: post #191
amiga-workbench wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely it can't cost much more to go for a larger eMMC chip and have it massively over-provisioned with plenty of space for wear levelling? The underlying flash memory is trash and the controller already does a ton of heavy lifting to keep the data coherent.

I don't think the problem is necessarily space, but rather write-limits being used by superfluous logging

That's where the wear levelling comes in, still expose 8GB of space to the host device, but internally have I dunno, twice that in cell capacity that you can move bits to as other cells wear out.

Its a shame mobile devices don't have a SMART equivalent, would be nice to have some warning as something approaches the end of its life.

Re: Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch

#238

Post by rpearce9 »

gstar wrote: post #70

OMFG; I am in Perth, I have the same system, the very same problem and solved it almost the same way and was in the process of writing it up. The system uses RS422, with a base64 encoded AES key in the aaservice binary, and I was contemplating building an esp32 based open source implementation of the controller. That's a crazy weird coincidence.

In case it's helpful to anyone, I put this together to drive our Advantage Air system:

https://git.nethack.net/rob/aircon

Essentially it just talks to the android tablet API to do things so it's no help if (when) the tablet dies, but it means I can do things like:

- have the entire unit turn on/off as needed based on average zone temperatures

- open/close vents based on room owners' devices being online, or temperatures of nearby zones

- dump zone temperatures to influxdb

Re: Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch

#239

Post by cuu508 »

hellweaver666 wrote: post #232

I had a similar situation with my shutter blinds. The company wanted €500 to install a "smart hub" to enable voice control instead of their little remote. To hell with that, I ordered a couple of servos and an esp8266 and 3d printed some little fingers that would press the buttons on the remote and added the whole thing to HomeAssistant via ESPHome. Cost me less than €30.

I disassembled one of our gate opener's remotes, and hooked the button contacts to Raspberry Pi Zero's GPIO pins. Pi runs a tiny go webserver and Cloudflare tunnel. I hit an obscure HTTPS URL (via button on a phone's homescreen), gate opens.

Re: Air Con: $1697 for an on/off switch

#240

Post by bitcharmer »

redact207 wrote: post #6

I love that this man resurrected his blog after 10 years just to write this. Anger and spite are strong motivators.

I love it too but this only becomes worthwhile if you manage to promote this post in social media somewhere. If you don't already have a strong social media presence or don't personally know anyone who does you can forget about it. And here on HN you really have to get lucky, post at the right time and hope the flagging gangs don't get you.
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