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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

#271

Post by TeMPOraL »

liminalsunset wrote: post #226
cyberax wrote: post #98

Ugh. The whole "smart aircon" industry needs a good-sized asteroid wiping them out of the existence. There is a very real need for modern variable-speed units, and vendors just keep fucking it up by using proprietary protocols locked into their ecosystem. TRANE in the US is similar. And this is really annoying because variable-speed pumps solve all the problems with short cycling and oversized systems.

The problem with having standards for this kind of thing is that different units have different needs for communication and different levels of being smart. For example, some units want 2 temperature sensors and some want 3. The method used to control the system can be relatively complex - some systems are using physical models of the characteristics and positioning of sensors to do fancy control, and there are proba…

Make it a certification requirement (UL or whatever) for the manufacturer to maintain a gold-level OSS Home Assistant integration, and all those problems would solve themselves in a heartbeat.

Alas, vendors that interface with customers do not sell appliances - they sell "solutions", specifically solutions to the problem of their own making, i.e. them inserting themselves between the buyer and the appliance they're buying.

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

#272

Post by mschuster91 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #251
nairboon wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on the particular consumer group, this could also backfire in the long term. With consumer warranty being ridiculously short. They will increasingly notice the pattern, that devices from brand X always brick shortly after warranty is over. And maybe moving to more trusting, but pricey brands.

Unfortunately, there are almost no "pricey brands" left that serve the middle range of price/quality. Most of them sold out to or just became replaced by bottom-of-the-barrel shit sellers, that are happy to continuously cycle through dozens of fly-by-night brands. It's still possible to get quality work done, but that's one of the few very premium brands and/or bespoke work; if you have to ask, you can't afford it. (…

> you notice the wave is growing and about to flood everything around you, but there's fuck all you can do about it.

Depends. For some product lines there's the "commercial grade" stuff available - for TVs, look into Digital Signage product lines and add some sort of TV stick (or an rpi) to them for the brains, for power tools look at what the tradespeople use (it's probably Bosch blue series, Makita or DeWalt), for kitchen equipment ask your nearest restaurant. For computing, I'd go to Apple (if your ecosystem supports it), Lenovo/Dell/HPs business line stuff (you don't need to buy the next day on-site package, but you want the models that do have that as an option because that's the ones that are both made for easy repair and have better components in the first place) or Framework. You pay quite the hefty premium over Chinesium stuff, but it's worth it.

Only thing I'd stay far away from if you're not trained on how to use them is cleaning supplies of all kinds, hair and body shampoo as the commercial ones are way stronger concentrated and you can do serious damage to your (or your loved ones) bodies if you, say, leave them on too long.

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

#274

Post by yuye »

michaelt wrote: post #255
yuye wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advantage Air doesn't produce ACs. They produce smart home solutions, including AC controllers. They're not winging it on an external control device, they're cheaping out on their main product. Also, their claim is that they're not outsourcing. If you check their website, it claims everything is designed and manufactured in Australia. Nevertheless, I'd have given them the benefit of the doubt if it were not for: 1. T…

> Also, their claim is that they're not outsourcing. If you check their website, it claims everything is designed and manufactured in Australia. Looking at pictures like [1] and [2] I suppose it's possible they're making their own generic android tablet control panel, designed and manufactured in Australia and they just happened to add a camera, side-mounted USB charging connector, a headphone socket, microsd card sl…

Should've added a bit more snark to that line to properly communicate that I absolutely don't believe their claims that everything is designed/made in Australia.

It's very obvious they just went for the cheapest bottom-of-the-barrel tablet Alibaba has to offer on one of their main products. I wouldn't trust this company to do anything competently.

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

#275

Post by lucioperca »

ranebo wrote: post #115
gstar wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, and you just need one of these and a TTL to RS422 converter off aliexpress to replicate the interface: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005918675239.html The connectors on the small RJ45 daughter board are JST-SH 1.0 The yellow lead puts out 4.2v to replicate a Li-Ion battery (as far as I can tell). You can ignore this. Red is positive Black is negative Green is usb d+ Blue is usb d-

This is all fantastic info. I have included the details and a link to these comments at the bottom of the post. Great work!

Tip: Instead of soldering I use splicing connectors with levers for testing stuff like this out. For example:

https://www.wago.com/de-en/c/installation-terminal-blocks-an...

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

#276

Post by squarefoot »

radicalbyte wrote: post #192
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.

Reading the original post, wouldn't be a super cool idea to make a little ESP or RPI based system which acted as a controller for the airco and a network bridge? Then literally anything could interface with it. You wouldn't even need to wire it up. No need to install some shitty app from a company who are quite clearly c*ts.

I'm sure that they made things more difficult by employing proprietary hardware wherever they can (also to discourage competition), but yes, there are a bunch of sensors and actuators in there and any board with the appropriate i/o capabilities should be able to interface to them, however writing a working firmware would be next to a nightmare: how do you find developers who want to spend months reverse engineering an AC and also know enough about ACs to put together something that works? Replacing household appliances brains with open counterparts would be a heck of a business opportunity to revive or prolong the life of dead/obsolete products, however I guess finding people who are interested enough to do that with FOSS, essentially selling only hardware and installation services would be really hard.

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

#277

Post by prmoustache »

imp0cat wrote: post #140
marcus_holmes wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Timezone effect, I think. Just us and the whole of East Asia online now. The Poms and Europeans are just about to wake up, and the Americans have logged off for the night.

This is exactly right! Good morning from Europe. :) Also congrats to the OP! Sadly, european aircon appliances are usually built the same way (last only as long as the warranty).

My own aircons are just simple individual items that are interchangeable between rooms.

There is no single control for the whole house but on the other hand I never let it run when I am away and I am never in 2 rooms at the same time so I just close the door so I only have to keep one room cool. I fail to see the need of an aircon I could control remotely with a smartphone or any smart bullshit system that control every room at the same time. And I think if I ever needed that I would probably just control the individual aircon via small esp32 with irtransmitter driven by a home server. That way the individual remotes would still be usable in case of an individual failure.

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

#278

Post by selcuka »

stavros wrote: post #263
radicalbyte wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading the original post, wouldn't be a super cool idea to make a little ESP or RPI based system which acted as a controller for the airco and a network bridge? Then literally anything could interface with it. You wouldn't even need to wire it up. No need to install some shitty app from a company who are quite clearly c*ts.

What evidence do you have that the company is composed of cats?

Because cats love warm houses.

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

#279

Post by jackvalentine »

chid wrote: post #169
ctippett wrote: post #155

Great write up. Australia has pretty good consumer protection laws.. I feel like the warranty period offered by the manufacturer could/should be superseded by the Consumers Guarantee Act – it seems reasonable to expect an AC unit to operate and work for more than a few years. There is no specific time when the consumer guarantees no longer apply to products. They may apply even after the manufacturer's warranty perio…

I just had look and seems most have a warranty of five years, it doesn't seem there are many outliers to that. Funnily though it seems the AC unit is most likely going to operate many times longer, as the OP points out just the controller isn't working properly, and how long would a consumer be willing to fight this in the summer in Perth.

I’ve used the Australian Consumer Law several times at this point and most times you say to the customer service rep “The Australian Consumer Law gives guarantees of acceptable durability that I do not think this product has met. How are you planning on remedying the situation?”

They’ll then generally go to speak to a supervisor.

The’ll then come back and say they’ve been instructed to help you escalate to ‘senior management’.

A day later they’ll contact you with how to get your product fixed for free.

I’ve not had a significant delay, but you’d be spewing if it was a heat wave in summer.

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

#280

Post by prmoustache »

athrun wrote: post #148
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…

I was thinking of doing the same but IR control only allows for unidirectional communication with the unit. Since there's no feedback mechanism, how do you solve for when the state of the unit(s) gets out of sync with HomeAssistant's?

AC is typically something you only need when you are inside the house so it is not like any freak situation would occur. If it happens only super occasionnally at worse you just set it the homeassistant state using the remote manually.

I guess you should hide those remote in a drawer and remove the batteries when you start using homeassistant

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