Haier, the air conditioner maker, takes down open source third-party Home Assistant integration
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/10882099
Thankfully I don't use any of their products, but this really pisses me off. They claim that this open source project "causes significant economic harm to their company"
This is ridiculous. It is truly ridiculous. How can something that enables the user to efficiently control their AC cause "significant economic harm"???
Consider forking the repository or mirroring it to another platform like GitLab, Codeberg or your self-hosted Git server, so the project can continue to exist and someone can maybe fork it and maintain it.
The effected repos are: https://github.com/Andre0512/hOn and https://github.com/Andre0512/pyhOn
If you don't know about Home Assistant, check it out. It's an amazing piece of open-source software, that you can run at home on your own server and use it to control your smart home devices. That way, you don't need to connect them to the manufacturer's (probably insecure) cloud. It gives you sovereignty over your smart home instead of some proprietary vendor-locked garbage. Check out their website and the Lemmy community: !homeassistant@lemmy.world
I also highly recommend Louis Rossmann's video about this: https://youtu.be/RcSnd3cyti0
He makes awesome videos in general, consider subscribing.
As Rossmann said, don't ever buy anything from such a shitty company that doesn't respect their customers. This move by Haier is nothing other than a slap in the face for everyone, who just wants to comfortably control the product they paid for. This company is actively hostile towards their paying customers. Fuck these bastards!
Oh! I have a solution! Make it a local API you fucking goofs.
I went with Daikin 'cause they had local control.... Except that they changed it in the meantime, and I had 2 different AC splits connected to the pump, one of them is older and still has local control, while the other is newer and doesn't. Fuck all of them.
You can make a thermostat with a raspberry pi, a few sensors, and a relay board. They're pretty simple devices.
Really, you don't even need a pi. An ESP8266 would be more than sufficient.
Source: I made my own thermostat from an esp8266, some sensors, and a relay board.
I did that, for my gas heater.
AC is more complex, it has fan speed, air direction (2 of them), temperature settings and so on. I solved with an IR blaster, but that's not what I wanted, I specifically selected this brand to have local control via wifi.
Good enough for a fan, furnace, and AC setup. What we need going forward, though, is something that can intelligently use heat pumps to take into account electrical costs, current rooftop solar generation (if any), and the heat pump's efficiency ratings in order to most efficiently balance between the heat pump and a regular furnace. Can choose the balance between either cheapest way to run or the least amount of CO2 (which won't always match up). May also have to consider multi-stage setups where you can run it at low/medium/high levels.
I don't think it's impossible for a FOSS solution to do this, but I don't think anyone has tackled it, either.
That's just a software problem. Not all that difficult, assuming the hardware manufacturers don't lock you into some bullshit locked down proprietary cloud control thing.
My manager once asked me if I could code in API
It depends if it's in the cloud or not
Nah, I'd rather data get sent out to external servers and then come back. This is efficient and very smart.