9 ms·

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 R

• gstar 2y ago
  Incidentally, if you root your tablet you can just change the build.MODEL to "MyAir5" and everything will work on a third party tablet.
  • gstar 2y ago
    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 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-
    • ranebo 2y ago
      This is all fantastic info. I have included the details and a link to these comments at the bottom of the post. Great work!
      • Nursie 2y ago
        Hey - As the owner of a similar system I have a question for you - do you use their phone app to control your system from your phone in/out of the house, and did it still work after this?
        • ranebo 2y ago
          I use the home assistant plugin with it personally, but I have tried the apps and they still work fine both locally and remote.
          • Nursie 2y ago
            Cool, that's all I needed to know, I'll be following in your footsteps at some point, thanks for taking the leap and doing all this :) Now back to connecting an orange-pi zero to the petcube cam someone bought me for Christmas. I've found TTL pins on there and I want to know what's going on...
      • saylisteins 2y ago
        Tiny QOL change without too much work, you could install something like teamviewer on the tablet, and now you're able to control your AC remotely from your PC, your phone, or anywhere!
        • selcuka 2y ago
          The MyAir (or e-Zone) app can already be accessed remotely. You install the app on your phone and pair it with your system by connecting to the same LAN. After the initial pairing it can be used from everywhere.
          • emilfihlman 2y ago
            Using which reverse service, though?
            • selcuka 2y ago
              From memory it connects to Firebase, possibly using the Realtime Database to sync state.
      • lucioperca 2y ago
        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-and-connectors https://www.wago.com/de-en/c/installation-terminal-blocks-an...
        • dt3ft 2y ago
          Wago has great stuff.
    • nehz 2y ago
      Would you have the RJ45 pinout too? Thanks!
      • gstar 2y ago
        No, sorry - I may be able to buzz one out of the a/c controller later on. I do, have 2 spare USB-C to JST-SH adapters that suit the round advantage air circuit board if anyone wants one (Perth, Free). Email in profile.
      • FLT8 2y ago
        This is from my earlier notes, hope it helps some. Pin 1: RS422 +/B Pin 2: RS422 -/A Pin 3: ? - appears to be unused; connected to unpopulated pad on PCB Pin 4: GND Pin 5: ~14.2v DC unloaded Pin 6: GND Pin 7: ? Pin 8: ? Shield: GND Note: the RS422 protocol has a basic bus arbitration built-in to allow both ends to communicate. The control unit sends <U>Ping</U=xx> messages, after which it opens a slot for the Tablet to communicate back to it. At least on my system xx represents a simple CRC value that can be used to validate message authenticity. I haven't seen any AES encryption in use, messages I've seen are all plaintext, maybe the AES encryption was introduced in a later revision.
        • binary_slinger 2y ago
          Wouldn't RS422 need 2 TX and 2 RX?
          • upofadown 2y ago
            Normally, yes. Perhaps this could be more properly termed RS-485 operating in 2 wire (half duplex) mode: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-485 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-485
          • gstar 2y ago
            I have something slightly different 1 is RS422 B 2 is RS422 A 3 & 5 - GND 4 & 6 - VCC Not sure what 7 and 8 do.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• ranebo 2y ago
  Oh wow, that is crazy! That sounds awesome so please still write it up and I will link. myreal.name@gmail
• thrtythreeforty 2y ago
  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.
  • gstar 2y ago
    It 100% is designed so that you have to use their hardware.
    • Liquix 2y ago
      so if the company has established they're willing to go that far to lock customers into their ecosystem and milk for $$$... it's not inconceivable that they also engineered (or chose not to fix) the cheap flash + chatty logging hardware failure for the same purpose.
      • yuye 2y ago
        Seems those tablets die not long after the warranty expires. I'm willing to bet money on that it's planned obsolescence, especially considering their "technology keeps moving forward" bullshit.
        • zeroflow 2y ago
          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 guaranteed write cycles of the flash memory were consumed.
          • yuye 2y ago
            >Thus they did not opt for more durable and expensive flash and/or software change. Opting out of a more durable solution when you know the device will break right after warranty is still planned obsolescence.
• dbetteridge 2y ago
  For a small place there's a lot of sandgropers on HN somehow
  • TechDebtDevin 2y ago
    For those also wondering: https://www.quora.com/Why-are-West-Australians-called-sandgropers https://www.quora.com/Why-are-West-Australians-called-sandgr...
  • marcus_holmes 2y ago
    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.
    • imp0cat 2y ago
      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).
      • Cthulhu_ 2y ago
        At least there's EU legislation that's slowly improving as well ensuring longer term warranties and the like. I hope that for household appliances like aircon or solar panels this warranty or support is set to its expected lifetime of 15-20 years. In this case, it should be mandatory that the control system can be easily swapped out by an aftermarket replacement, just like central heating thermostats are. (in fact, replacing basic central heating thermostats with a tablet device has been very successful for one energy company in my country, see https://www.eneco.nl/energieproducten/toon-thermostaat/ https://www.eneco.nl/energieproducten/toon-thermostaat/; it wouldn't have been possible if the thermostat data thing was some complicated / encrypted nonsense)
      • prmoustache 2y ago
        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.
• ivraatiems 2y ago
  Almost like all the tablets fail around the same time because they're made in the same shoddy way, forcing system replacements every so many years...
  • Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    They skimped on the tablet, grabbing a <$100 device for cheap. It should be a ruggedized / semi-industrial device with an expected lifetime as long as the device it controls, so at least 15-20 years.
    • HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
      That would set them back at least $800 (2021 prices: last time I had to spec a ruggedized tablet), which probably means $1200 out of the customer's pocket. OTOH, they can find an industrial display + a Linux SoM (system-on-module) that can run linux or Android for under $200 in quantity. Same diff though: no one cared, so they got what was cheap.
• virtue3 2y ago
  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.
  • sumtechguy 2y ago
    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?
    • Suppafly 2y ago
      >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.
      • sumtechguy 2y ago
        I guess I should have added a /s :)
• FLT8 2y ago
  I've got one of these systems too. Mine hasn't died yet, touch wood, but I was concerned enough about the possibility that I went as far as documenting the comms protocol and starting to design a pi hat to talk to the main control board. I should really write that up at some point too.
  • jamesholden 2y ago
    Do it! I don't live in Australia or have on of these systems, but I was intrigued by how the OP had gone around the company to save themselves 1500! I'm curious to see how people are resolving things like this, so that if I have issues myself sometime, I have ideas on where to start or what is necessary :)
• radicalbyte 2y ago
  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.
  • stavros 2y ago
    What evidence do you have that the company is composed of cats?
    • selcuka 2y ago
      Because cats love warm houses.
  • squarefoot 2y ago
    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.
    • datavirtue 2y ago
      It's just a pin out interface controlled via software to turn things on or off. Its trivial. Get a raspberry pie, lookup the pinout docs stuffed away in your home manuals drawer, and write the measly logic required. The most difficult part is whipping up a UI and building the scheduling logic, if want/need it.
• rpearce9 2y ago
  In case it's helpful to anyone, I put this together to drive our Advantage Air system: https://git.nethack.net/rob/aircon 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
  • lelandfe 2y ago
    Nice use of Telegram as a cheap logging tool
• f1shy 2y ago
  Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCpVGwSJoyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCpVGwSJoyQ
• fatcow 2y ago
  another perthian! w00t