Sorry for late reply, I can’t tell you the exact price as was part of complete Advance R32 system. I had this quoted on by a number of suppliers, only one mentioned the price and he said was around $500 option. In my case I opted against the expensive tablet like Neo controller and just went with the BMS card and 3 LR7 wall controllers over 7 zones. This combo ended up being a similar price to the system with just a single Neo controller. I run the card in Basic BMS control mode, it works pretty well but only averages the temperatures across zones that have a LR7 and that are switched on. The LR7 wall controllers have temp sensors in them. From what I understand the Advance system allows up to 3 wall controllers + 3 temp sensors + the BMS card.
If I get more motivated I wouldn’t mind exploring running it in the Advanced BMS mode where you get direct control over the compressor and fans, in the case of an Advance system you could control compressor demand 20-100%. I also have a bunch of 3rd party TH sensors around the house and it would be pretty cool to get this working with a PID setup via HA.
I just committed to purchasing an Actron unit as part of my new home build.
I ended up with the Neo unit as they provided it “free”. I’m sure I still paid for it in the whole price but wouldnt get credit for removing it.
I have 8 zones, 4 sensors and the bms card. They charged me $850 for the bms card but didn’t want to rely on the cloud.
I’ll install a modbus to Ethernet adapter at the unit and control it that way.
My home build will be at least a year away so some time until I get to test it out.
Hi Johann, The BMS card goes in the outdoor unit and you just need a shielded two pair cable to extend the RS485 (3 wires + shield) back to where you plan to have your Modbus TCP bridge. I used a cheap wired one called a NB114 and it’s proven reliable.
An update on the modbus gateway I was using as the NB114 died. Have switched to a USR-TCP232-304 which also works fine, little tricky to setup and documentation is vague and web pages vary a lot between firmware versions (mine has V4300). Key settings seemed to be TCP server mode and Modbus TCP/RTU set.
I’ll also add the installer seemed so have a lot of problems commissioning the system with multiple controllers present. There is a process that needs to be followed when there are multiple controllers present with setting the addressing. From what I gather this installer didn’t seem to have much experience with a multiple controller setup.
Also the BMS card was installed with the power and data pairs crossed over from the Actron factory ! It took me a number of weeks to work out why the card appeared dead and wasn’t talking at all. It was only after I started looking at the physical cabling to the BMS card and buzzing it out with a meter I found this. Luckily the expensive BMS card did not seem damaged by having 12v applied to it’s data pair. The installer really wanted nothing to do with the BMS card and basically said that is all my responsibility.
Hi, I am using the ICAMIB-MOD but guessing operation will be the same. I also used the NB114 after seeing your post . Got it working now. I would like to use the below register
Seems to be not implemented in modbus out of the box. I’ve done a workaround. Hope to improve the look … that will be for another day. Also there is a delay when the card status/color is updated. I read somewhere that the status is polled every 10s but there is a mechanism to poll straight away … that will be for another day too!!
# configuration.yaml
modbus:
- type: rtuovertcp
host: xxx.xxxx.xxx.xxx
port: 8887
name: actron
#....below is only for the fan control and mode functions only
sensors:
- name: Actron Fan Mode
input_type: holding
address: 4
slave: 1
scale: 1
min_value: 0
max_value: 4
- name: Actron Fan Controls
input_type: holding
address: 105
slave: 1
scale: 1
min_value: 0
max_value: 1
Next one is to implement timers. I want to be able to set run time (ie: 2 hours) or start/stop times. Essentially the controls that are available in the keypad … should not be too difficult but that will be for another day
Hey guys, just wanted to say I got every single control into home assistant manualy using only rest commands and http request. It is all done in NODE-RED, need to find the time to write it up properly so other people can you it, just wanted to show you guys in the mean time. ActronConnect app functionality is maintained. In the dashboard I used dropdowns to select the mode and fan speed. Only thing left to do is timer, but that is easy.
I just have to remove the actron connect IDs and I will share it. Reading the state of the aircon is using local http commands and sending commands are done using rest cloud api.
Great work! I’m motivated to create one for HA especially now that I’ve received notification from Actron that they won’t be updating their phone app anymore.
Maybe you could show us an example of getting the state of the aircon and one example of sending a command in the meantime?
One example I’d like to see is how to get you link Node-Red with the UI.
The app wasn’t that brilliant to start with. In the interim I’ve added the website to a webpage card with 140% aspect ratio.
Would really like to be able to control it in HA then I can finally automatically turn it on when it gets very hot outside!
The phone app. They said they won’t make any further updates which means one day it’ll fail to work on your phone (when your phone gets very very updated) but you can still control it using a web browser.
