481–490 of 496 posts
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I made my daughter’s bed from scratch out of anger and spite toward IKEA.
I made my daughter’s bed from scratch out of anger and spite toward IKEA. I would have used wood and nails. You must have terrifically strong emotions!
For the curious I did actually end up using very similar materials to ikea themselves. Pine for wood and melamine particle board. It cost me twice as much and took me 2 days to cut and assemble. Worth it.
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I made my daughter’s bed from scratch out of anger and spite toward IKEA. I would have used wood and nails. You must have terrifically strong emotions!
That’s pretty good :) For the curious I did actually end up using very similar materials to ikea themselves. Pine for wood and melamine particle board. It cost me twice as much and took me 2 days to cut and assemble. Worth it.
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To start, aircon is an incredible racket in general a lot of the time. Good companies exist, but lots of others, especially in the USA, have been bought up by big holding companies and converted in to profit maximization new-system sales machines. Techs get paid pretty poorly, and helpers get paid worse than mcdonalds/target in a lot of areas. There's not much financial incentive for someone to get really good at und…
This is why I chose to replace my basic forced air gas furnace and basic 16 seer single speed single stage A/C unit with the same thing. Every part on these is relatively simple, largely serviceable and every parts house coming and going will have something that fits. I disagree with others that any of the more fancy stuff is any more reliable (and Dad worked as an HVAC master tech for a long time and also agrees wit…
> I also don't understand the obsession with "smart" controls on any residential single family home when a basic programmable thermostat already does basically everything.
don't get me started on this. all this "learn your schedule and adapt conditioning to match where you are" is literally the one thing you ARENT supposed to do with efficient heat pumps, which are becoming more and more common. You set it at a temp, maybe you let it bump up 1-2 degrees in the heat of the day and then back down later at night, but any more than that is LESS EFFICIENT and more expensive overall. I don't get it.
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.
What the hell, why does a control system need an AES-secured control channel at all? The only possible intention is to make interop more difficult. If they wanted security then they wouldn't use a hard coded AES key.
That being said it's more likely the hardware mfg is just trying to claw in more margin.
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You're both missing one of the more likely explanation.. that nobody gave much thought about how long the device would last. "It's solid state electronics, it'll probably outlast the warranty anyway".. I can imagine an aircon company puts a lot of effort into analyzing the air-conditioning unit itself to make sure it lasts at least as long as the warranty, with good margin. But I can totally see them winging it on an…
>I don't think actual malicious planned obsolescence is as prevalent as many believe. Working in the electronics industry, I have never once heard anyone talk about this. Engineers love engineering, and if it was real their would be a whole field devoted to it. But there isn't. Also, since this board is stacked with software guys... Planned obsolescence is way easier to implement in software. How many of you have bee…
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You're both missing one of the more likely explanation.. that nobody gave much thought about how long the device would last. "It's solid state electronics, it'll probably outlast the warranty anyway".. I can imagine an aircon company puts a lot of effort into analyzing the air-conditioning unit itself to make sure it lasts at least as long as the warranty, with good margin. But I can totally see them winging it on an…
> I don't think actual malicious planned obsolescence is as prevalent as many believe. I've been saying this for a while. Consumers are insanely price-sensitive while also short-sighted. They'll buy a $20 blender that will die in a year rather than the $100 blender that will last a lifetime. Manufacturers know this and there's a race to the bottom on pricing. To get pricing as low as possible, quality and durability…
One problem for consumers is that often it's very hard to tell which is which. There is no guarantee that a $60 item won't just be overpriced garbage which is as bad (or worse if they spent much of that money on unnecessarily complex features that reduce reliability) as the $20 one, so always picking the cheaper item that superficially might seem good enough is not necessarily irrational.
(of course this doesen't necessarily apply to all brands yet)
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I think it is some sort of serial comm over cat5. My only concern was getting the thing working again :) But if still interested here is a close up of the chip side of the POE connector: https://blog.hopefullyuseful.com/blog/advantage-air-ezone-ta...
Cheers, I am looking at this for our system but it is still working so I didn't want to mess it up, but was planning for the eventuality... I've been reverse engineering the app, so your post has cleared a few things up for me :) The plan is to get rid of the tablet and put a Amazon echo hub or HA on a tablet that directly controls the aircon in the future
As far as HA integration goes, there's already an adapter available that uses the HTTP API that the tablet exposes. This of course still requires a working tablet though.
The next step for an open solution would be to either write a replacement for the tablet API that talks directly to the control box using RS485 (which will have the benefit of allowing existing integrations to work as-is), or perhaps even ignore the original API and start from scratch with something custom built for HA integration.
The original HTTP API that the tablet exposes is relatively straightforward, but it also commits quite a few sins against HTTP, such as mutating state on GET requests (making CSRF type attacks trivial). This makes a like-for-like replacement a little less palatable in my eyes.
The other tricky thing is that the tablet code is where a lot of the state is kept and the smarts of the system are located. Zone names and config, schedules, temperature sensor pairing, ... replacing the tablet API completely like-for-like might be tricky, but doing just enough to support HA integration (maybe submitting a patch to the existing integration to support the new custom API) is probably a much easier task. There should be no need to rebuild features that HA already has such as scheduling etc.
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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.
For what it's worth, I bought this for my old chamberlain. https://gotailwind.com
I was looking into replacing the old unit with a new one with myq but then read about all the problems and decided to give this a shot. 3 years in and it's been a good decision.