Add integration for Hisense devices using ConnectLife

I’m interested as well as I just bought and installed an HiSense trial split AC system with embedded WiFi modules. I am not home so I cannot test it now but I connected ConnectLife to Alexa so I guess we can control the devices through Alexa Media Player sending commands.

I recieved the same response back. I think we need to write to them again in a couple of months.

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I Had a similar idea, but I used a generic thermostat as the trigger condition. The problem with this solution that the device beeps every time it gets an instruction despite having the device muted inside the ConnectLife app.

yes, there are some ways to send cmd to the AC, but the huge problem is to get the state, even the alexa integration just get the temperature from the device.

Is there any progress on this? for who is/was working on it, where are you stucked? can we help?

thanks

I have seen somthing interesting here…AEH-W4G2 · Issue #160 · deiger/AirCon · GitHub

Hi,

They are postponing the unofficial release date. Now they say end of the year :frowning:

Thank you for reaching out to ConnectLife support team! We apologize for the inconvenience this causes you and are happy to help you.

We understand that compatibility with a wide range of platforms is important for our users, and we want to ensure that ConnectLife meets your needs and preferences. So to answer your question, we do not currently, but our team is actively developing a public API for custom integrations.

Although we cannot provide an exact timeline for when it will be available at this moment, we want you to know that your patience and support are greatly appreciated. We are aiming by the end of the year based on our current progress. However, I would like to emphasize that this is an estimation and may be subject to adjustments as we strive to deliver the best possible product. For any other questions, feel free to reach us!

B

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I’ve managed to create an automation (2 to be exact) that might help. You can control a dummy climate entity and tell the google assistant sdk to make changes as you change the climate entity through HA. It also querries the state of the AC every 5 minutes so if you make changes with it’s remote or through ConnectLife, HA will update it on the entity. Only downside that the unit beeps every time it gets a request despite having it muted in the ConnectLife app.
note that it’s quite a barebone solution and it will bloat your google activity feed

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Thank you for sharing! That’s a very smart workaround. I’ll try to setup something similar.

Could you share more details on the dummy thermostat config? More precisely, what did you use for heater and target_sensor entities?

I’ve developed an own interface for Hisense air conditioners with ESP32 instead of AEH-W4_1, which works 98% of the time, only in some cases I get an unexpected message from the device and I couldn’t figure out the meaning of this message up till now, and I don’t have enough time to finalize it. The biggest advantage of it is that it works via the local Ethernet. So it can work without Internet, it works much faster and the big brother cannot monitor the traffic. If somebody is able and would join to the developing then we could share the project with the community afterwards. :wink: Every function of the AC can be controlled with it and every state can be monitored. (Current temperature, Target temperature, Fan speed, Power mode /fan, heat, cool, dry, auto/, Swing /On, Off/, Preset /Comfort, ECO, Boost/

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Can you post the code on the github? Not a developer myself (have tried many times to learn how to code without any luvk) but maybe others can jump in and ppl like myself can buy ones a beer?

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I have this AC unit and idk to control from HA as energy excess from my solar plant.
Pls share with us, thank you.

Reached the HiSense support team as was mentioned above

Let’s keep the fingers crossed

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same answer to me…hope end of the year

Sorry for the late reply. For the target sensor I used a temperature&humidity sensor’s temperature data and for the heater i’ve made an input_boolean helper. If you don’t have a T&H sensor that you could use for that purpose, an another workaround could be to also querry what the AC reports as indoor temperature and save it to an input_number helper with the input_number.set_value service. I would advise against this option because the AC, when running would report values that are +/- 6 degrees off compared to the actual temperature.

Made a quick proof of concept that’s working pretty well on the console: https://github.com/andy2002a/HA-ConnectLife/blob/main/poc.py

You need to get an API key from here: Swagger UI (connectlife.io)

Only tested on an AC unit so far. If someone knows how to convert this into an HA integration let me know and we can colab on it.

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Can you give more info how to test your POC script?

Thnx.

  1. Go here: Swagger UI

  2. Click Authorize (leave the default values)

  3. Back on the main page, click on “GET /api/v1/appliance”, then “try it out”, then “execute”

  4. This should generate a curl request that looks like

-H 'Authorization: Bearer xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  1. copy the xxxxx into the access_token variable in the script

  2. Modify the parameters of the functions below to change the respective settings

device.setSystemMode('Cool', True)
device.changeTemperature('68', True)
device.setFanSpeed('Medium', True)

This Is very promising!

Sorry for the very basic question but how do I run that .py script in Home Assistant?

Did everything as you described. Tried running the script from Dev Tools - Services but nothing happened. Tried running it while aircon was off and on.
I guess temp ‘68’ is in F not C?

It’s not an HA integration so you can run it anywhere that allows you to run python scripts. I just ran it on a Linux VM I have for testing. So you would do something like:

  1. Modify the script with your access_token
  2. Modify the script with your desired parameters for changeTemperature, setFanSpeed, etc.
  3. run it: python ./poc.py