Actron EasyConnect app - Midea A/C skin

Configuration
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Hey HA community!

I wanted to cast the line out, and see what bites I get.

I was hopeful when I moved into my house with Actron air conditioners and noticed there was some activity with them on the HA forums.
Pretty quickly I realised that the EasyConnect app (the one my specific a/c models use) was different to the other ActronConnect app which already has a couple of solutions working for it, but aren’t applicable in this case.

I should preface this with, I have no experience in this area and am happy to be corrected/guided, but I started sniffing around what the EasyConnect app was connecting to.

What I did discover was that the EasyConnect app might just be a skin on the Midea A/C app, as it is pinging the same server.

There are a few people who’ve done some great work with Midea connections:

GitHub - mac-zhou/midea-ac-py: This is a custom component for Home Assistant to integrate the Midea Ai (<- I followed this primarily)
msmart · PyPI

I tried following some of these guides, but couldn’t get a successful connection using their settings.
I managed to decode my userID and deviceID, but hit a wall with the midea-discover step, which couldn’t find the AC.
(It’d be great for someone else to double check this on their own systems)

My uneducated guess is that they might be using a different endpoint for the Actron version of the app perhaps?

I was wondering if someone smarter had any suggestions for modifying a Midea A/C integration to get it working for Actron EasyConnect? Or had any other tests that I should try to get this project off the ground?

Any direction is appreciated - Cheers!

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I know this thread was created a year ago, but so far I have been able to link the Midea MSmartHome and the Midea Air app directly to the Actron AC but still can not get midea-discover to find it.

Did you ever end up finding a solution for this?

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Using the links in this thread, I was able to integrate the Actron Air / Easyconnect systems with Home Assistant.

Here’s what I’ve done:

  • Initially I set up the A/C units with the Wifi dongles so that they could connect to Easyconnect. I also downloaded the MSmartHome app and did the same setup process there - the app looks a bit more modern than easyconnect
  • I noted down the IP addressees of the AC units which I saw on my router.
  • Then I followed the instructions above to install midea_ac via HACS
  • Then I SSH’d into the Home Assistant instance to run pip3 install msmart and ran midea-discover
  • The parameter for midea-discover was -i xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx i.e. the IP address needed to be passed on as well.
  • The output of midea-discover provided me with the ID, token, and k1 of the unit which then needed to be setup in configuration.yaml as per the midea_ac instructions
  • Finally, I could add a temperature card, and even convert the temperature values into sensor values using a template so that I could chart them.

Thanks for your help with this :slight_smile:

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Just for anyone else that may come across this thread, I have managed to attach systems using the above method but it did not matter whether they were added to wifi via MSmartHome or the EasyConnect app. But for the midea-discover I had to use the -a and -p arguments with MSmartHome account email/password (but despite using the account it still did not matter if they were added to MSmartHome).

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I never actually got around to finishing this off… I wrote this partially as notes to my future self, so thanks everyone for continuing on with it,

Thanks for the step-by-step @bernhardm
A few notes from my installation:

  • I connected the units to wifi via the Midea Air app
  • I initially picked the wrong Midea component in HACS - I just had to double check the read me used the midea_ac platform and not something else
  • Also, I managed to get midea-discover to list my machines without any IP address prompts - not sure what I did differently there

Thanks again all - I’ve got my ACs setup now!

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I was struggling to get my Actron Air Conditioner to work in HA. This thread made it simple to get it running. If others stumble across this then this may make things a lot easier for you.