AO Smith Bluetooth control?

ESPHome
1

Thanks to a broken heat pump, I’m now the “proud” owner of a new AO Smith HPTS-50. I’m aware of the existing, cloud based integration, but my unit also has Bluetooth. And I’d much rather keep things local. It doesn’t hurt that my unit refuses WiFi anyway

I’ve been capturing BLE traffic from the Android app and have made solid progress reverse engineering the protocol - it’s unencrypted, and I have mode/temperature control working at the protocol level. At least, I believe so, based on the captures; the data was pretty clear. The main obstacle right now is connection sequencing: the device is very picky about the order of operations, and it terminates immediately if anything is out of place. Bleak is a non-starter because of how it handles service discovery, I believe. The device booted it immediately.

I’d love to have this as an ESPHome external component, but I could use some help - either from someone who has looked at AO Smith BLE before, or someone with deep ESP-IDF / Bluetooth experience who wants to collaborate.

Anyone done any work in this space, or interested in contributing?

2 Likes
2

Hey, I’m working on a similar project with my AO-Smith HPS10. additionally complicating the picture is I cant actually get my app to connect the water heater via bluetooth either. I pulled a HCI snoop log that I can pass along, but id love to know how you pulled temperature readings. I’ve spent a couple hours working with Claude today to try and work through some of the issues I have ran into.

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Very interested as well since the ao smith cloud is so unstable