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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

#431

Post by paranoidrobot »

35mm wrote: post #145
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…

How did you pick cheap blasters compatible with HA? I have a Broadcom one which works well but expensive.

Reddit and Google was how I chose which one to go with.

The Broadlinks RM4 minis were pretty cheap on AliExpress. I think I paid about $15 each? Might have to wait for specials to come up to get the lowest price.

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

#432

Post by FLT8 »

gstar wrote: post #340
FLT8 wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, not sure what's going on there then.. how recently was your system installed? Maybe they have updated the pinout on newer models? I'll go back and check though.

You're right! The serial bus isn't encrypted! I got inspired, and have plugged in my scope, and then an RS422 to serial adapter, and I'm getting XML encoded (weird) CAN messages, which I presume are the same as what's on the CAN bus exposed on some of the control box's ports. I'll get out the can analyser tomorrow and check. Now the trick will be to reverse engineer this protocol. Here's a tiny sample: setCAN 0201000…

I have reached out to your email address (as described in your profile) with some additional information that I've been putting together. Let me know if you didn't receive my mail.

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

#433

Post by dfox »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #229
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…

IR is fine for these things, it's not like they need much data. I have an IR ceiling fan, no issues there (even if the receiver is on a little wire that is supposed to stick to something but the sticktivity of the tape sucked), and a radio "smart" lighting system (just simple on / off switch on a plug socket). And some radio spots from IKEA, although I'm sure that can be hooked up to a "smart" system.

IKEA has consistent smart system that has the annoying feature that it works the wrong-way around for my use-case. The cheap IKEA switches can control IKEA peripherals only directly, you can't use them to control something outside of the IKEA ecosystem. As most of the things I want to control are either HomeKit native things or digital outputs on PLCs it does not work for me. So in the spirit of true overkill I have few switches that contain OrangePi Nano (I had somehow absurd quantity of these laying around as leftover from previous even more misguided project)

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

#434

Post by paranoidrobot »

davesmylie wrote: post #178
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…

funny - I literally bought a broadlink ir blaster today and got it hooked up to HA about 15 minutes ago, looking to do this exact same thing. Out of curiousity, did you have any resources you were following to set this up? I'm pretty new to HA - basic devices etc seem fine, but I'm not entirely sure where to go next!

Welcome to the club.

I'm using Broadlink RM4 Mini's I got off AliExpress. They've got a powerful enough IR signal that I've found I don't need them sitting way out in the open and obvious. One is tucked behind a TV and not quite in direct LoS, one is behind, but it reflects off the wall just fine, another behind a bedside table.

For the integration/Climate control thing I'm using SmartIR. Configuring it is a bit weird, you have to put it direct into the configuration.yaml file unlike other integrations.

    smartir:
      check_updates: true

    climate:
      - platform: smartir
        name: Bedroom AC
        unique_id: bedroom_ac
        device_code: 1293 
        # https://github.com/smartHomeHub/SmartIR/blob/master/docs/CLIMATE.md#available-codes-for-climate-devices
        controller_data: remote.mini4c_bedroom
        temperature_sensor: sensor.airquality_ikea_bedroom_temperature
        humidity_sensor: sensor.airquality_ikea_bedroom_humidity
        power_sensor: binary_sensor.contact_bed_ac

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

#435

Post by BizarroLand »

ehhthing wrote: post #18

It's unlikely that the company itself makes these tablets, they probably buy bulk off Alibaba or something and they all probably fail at the same time because the were all made at the same time. The real problem is that the quoted replacement price is so high, given that we know the tablets themselves are like $30 each.

I bet it's the POE part that is the issue.

They could control the whole system over POE with a bog standard usb to ethernet adapter, make the app easily run on any android device and charge the customer less for a better more reliable product, but rather than do that they rigged up some janky interface and built a custom enclosure hired out to an overseas manufacturer who bought the parts for $20 and charged the middleman $100 for them, who then charged the dealer $250 for them, who then charged the installer $600 for them, who then charged the customer $1600 for them. (Got to get that 2.5x margin on hardware every step of the way, after all!)

If they had gone with a POE system, wiring would have been cheap, replacement parts plentiful, and customer satisfaction would be sky high. Sure, you would sell fewer full systems, but to me that is a small price to pay for having the most useful and interesting systems on the market with fans creating all sorts of mods and integrations for your equipment and becoming customers for life.

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

#436

Post by dfox »

girvo wrote: post #57
Lammy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very convenient for them and also easy to accomplish by buying the cheapest parts. It's probably eMMC-based and writing a logfile constantly. Source: every Android that has ever died on me in this exact way (four and counting)

Yep this is nearly guaranteed. Kills so many IoT things, logging the world and eMMC write limits being garbage.

SDs and eMMC also usually have the same feature as the famous IBM “DeathStar” HDDs from the 00's: the thing gets completely hosed when it loses power when write is in progress.

I do not have exact statistics but I believe that this is the most common failure mode of SD cards in embedded systems that we supply (but a friend who works for certain ARM and PowerPC SoC vendor told me that he has statistics that disprove my theory, so take that with a grain of salt).

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

#437

Post by emilecantin »

cyberax wrote: post #147
pzlarsson wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, but EV chargers are not that complicated. They are just smart contactors, with maaaybe some load management (EVSE can command the vehicle to reduce the charging rate). Worst case, you just buy another one. It'll set you back a couple hundred dollars. Unpleasant, but not a big deal. Air conditioning systems can easily cost more than $10k.

> (EVSE can command the vehicle to reduce the charging rate)

That's just a PWM signal on one of the pilot pins, it's not even that complex.

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

#438

Post by cameldrv »

spikej wrote: post #407
cameldrv wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest maker of garage door openers in the U.S. has done the same thing. For a button that goes on the wall to open the door, now it sends an encrypted code instead of just shorting two wires so that you have to use their button instead of a regular doorbell button like people have been doing for decades.

Which company, and which product did you see this with?

Chamberlain and Liftmaster do this. They’re both owned by Chamberlain group and I believe they are the two most popular brands.

It’s caused tons of headache for people doing home automation stuff, especially since Chamberlain has cut off API access to home assistant. Then the home assistant people figure they’ll just rig a raspberry pi or something to short two wires, but then they hit this encryption nonsense.

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

#439

Post by dfox »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #353
cbanek wrote: post #17

This is when smart gets stupid. I'm a bit worried about this with my nest and other smart devices, but even with normal air conditioners there are a few stupid simple problems that will cost you hundreds of dollars! A couple of weeks ago my AC blower fan stopped working, the compressor would run. I went up and found out that the capacitor was bad, and took a picture of it, buying a replacement. Took about 15 minutes…

Everyone reading this should find out what capacitor they need and buy one off Amazon, they're all I've done this repair myself, it takes maybe <15 minutes and is almost impossible to mess up. Even if you were find spending a couple hundred dollars to have someone come out and do it, you'd still go hours at least without AC. Which depending on the time of year can be miserable.

Don't buy electronics components from marketplaces of any kind. There are reputable parts suppliers and for things that are common and in stock it will probably even be cheaper and faster than buying the same thing (of unknown provenance and quality) from who knows what seller on random marketplace.

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

#440

Post by Suppafly »

sumtechguy wrote: post #368
virtue3 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sounds like the memory storage is failing on some sort of logging systems for these to be going down at the same time-ish (same number of logs per day written etc over cheap flash). Shame on this manufacturer.

It is a conversation I have had with many a jr dev. 'ok you are logging this how much space is that going to take? how long do you want to keep it? what is your rotation schedule?' I usually get the 'oh did not think of that' because logging is a serious afterthought in many cases. It is boring and you just drop in log4j and log away right?

>It is boring and you just drop in log4j and log away right?

log4j had big vulnerability a while back and it was a huge pain to contact all our vendors and find out if they had patched for it or not.

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