I decided to add a multi-zone mini split heat pump to my house, and naturally, one of my top priorities was getting it to play nice with Home Assistant. After digging around, I found out that the C&H units you can easily find in the U.S. are just rebranded Midea products. The good news? My favorite firmware project, ESPHome, natively supports these through the Midea integration.
C&H does sell a Wi-Fi dongle that works with their app, but it’s overpriced and locked down—no ESPHome for you! So, I went with the Smartlight SLWF-01 instead.
When it arrived, I flashed it with ESPHome, and everything worked great. I had basic control of the mini split and could automate it with Home Assistant. But then I hit a snag: I couldn’t control the mini split’s LED display light. This wouldn’t be a big deal if it were in the living room, but these are in the bedrooms, and those LEDs are way too bright.
At the time, there wasn’t much documentation, but I found out that some Midea units only expose certain features over infrared, not UART. So, I picked up a pack of infrared emitters and receivers and wired one up to the spare GPIO on the dongle. Normally, you’d add a transistor and resistor to the circuit, but I tested it without them, and it worked. Just connect the short leg of the IR emitter to the PCB ground and the long leg to GPIO5. Here’s what it looked like before I added some hot glue for strain relief:
As far as ESPHome, the code was very basic to get this working:
|
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 |
remote_transmitter: pin: GPIO5 carrier_duty_percent: 50% button: - platform: template name: "${friendly_name} Display Toggle" id: midea_display_toggle icon: mdi:theme-light-dark on_press: midea_ac.display_toggle: |
Be First to Comment