…hmmm. I think I have one last thought on the topic (for now). I just checked the jumpers on my XSP and found that all of the baud rate jumpers are off, or 000 in their terms. So from the ‘it works for me’ school of logic, that might be worth a try.
Everything else, cable included, sounds right to me.
The keypad message sounds helpful. I tried to replicate it here and failed. If I disconnect the XSP from the thermostats it just goes on pretending they are there. Of course the status on the thermostats never changes, but that’s not always obvious. I also disconected the XSP from the Elk. The only indication I received was on the “enroll” page of ElkRP where is showed the device missing. Disconnecting an input expander, on the other hand, does show a message on the keypad. At version 5.1.8 I’m not current. Perhaps newer firmware is a bit better about reporting missing thermostats.
Oh… make sure you shutdown or disconnect ElkRP from the elk. When connected it’s in programming mode and doesnt work the same as when it’s not. I’ve confused myself for hours by leaving it connected.
Okay I tried to get it to talk to my thermostats with M1RP disconnected and it had no effect no command made it to my Thermostats from the Rules that the M1 Gold has even move the jumpers back to the 000 position no effect
Finally figured out how to connect Via Serial port from the ELK M1 to Home Assistant all thermostats showed up in HA but they are dead I can get any readings or send any commands to the thermostats
Temp shows 0* I can activate various commands in Home Assistant but no changes is acknowledged at that thermostat
well this was a long hard road
finally got the thermostats working through the ELK M1 Gold
this path is not a cheap one but seems to be the only path if you want to integrate the 8800/8870 thermostats
went through alot of hoops that was not need to accomplish
it boiled down to doing a factory reset on all my thermostats and they started working with the ELK
the intergration in Home Assistant works as expected so now have control and monitoring of the thermostats on the app
It requires a bit of technical savy and more parts than just the elk gold to connect to the thermostats the instructions are decent but not great, it is not a cheap path to get the 8800 to work in home assistant but it is the only one I found
I was able to get the Aprilaire WiFi Dev kit from Aprilaire support (they give it to you if you ask, but won’t post it online) but got stuck and abandoned trying after I couldn’t get port 8000 to open on my thermostats. Since it sounds like y’all got way farther than I did, could one of you explain how to do that?
Mine is a 6000 series and uses port 7000. To enable it, you have configure the thermostat for ‘Automation’. To do this, Navigate to Menu, then press and hold ‘Contractor Menu’. It will prompt you to continue, say yes. Once in the setup menu, go to ‘Installer tools and test’->Connection Type. Select Automation. Then exit the setup menu. Note, the thermostat will be ‘Off’ when you exit the setup menu, so, don’t forget to set it back to ‘Cool’ (or ‘Heat’).
I have successfully communicated with it using documentation from Aprilaire with a C#/.NET app. I don’t know much about python or home assistant though, otherwise we would probably already have an integration
I use the 6000 series as well. Which documentation did you use? I got the wifi programmers guide from Aprilaire, but it seems to be for the 8000 series.
If you don’t mind sharing your C#/.NET code, I do .NET for a living so that would be super helpful. I can do Python OK, so it would be good to have a starting point to developing an integration.
Excellent, just what I needed. I confirmed that I am able to connect to my 6000 series. The long and the short of it is you enable the home automation mode which opens up a raw socket connection on port 7000, which you can send commands to per the wifi dev kit. Working on getting a quick HA mockup together but no promises that it will work outside of my own environment
For those that are interested, once you request/receive the wifi dev kit, you can easily extract/install the MSI and then decompile the DLLs and review the C# source. It’s… not great. But, it’s a good starting point.
I think the biggest difference between the 6000 series and the 8840 is the 6000 series can have up to 3 remote zone thermostats. I have a set of these remote zone thermostats that I have tested with, and I haven’t yet nailed down if the zone thermostats can be referenced with the API, but I will try.
I also have noticed that the connection to the thermostat doesn’t seem very stable and will freeze after a period of minutes. When this happens, so far the only way I have found to reestablish it is to reboot the thermostat. I am not sure if this is a thermostat problem or a ‘me’ problem.
I’ve noticed the same thing. In my testing it seemed like it happened when I closed and reopened the socket a number of times, so I was thinking there might be an issue with orphaned sockets on the thermostat. I did find that it was more stable leaving the socket open and just waiting for COS packets which seemed to come in consistently. But, I didn’t run it for a terribly long time, so that may not be 100% accurate.
As a status update, I now have a working climate component in HA that is able to control the Aprilaire. It currently has mappings for reading the temperature and mode, and writing the temperature set points and mode. Need to work through the remaining mappings, but hoping to have a Git link for folks to poke at soonish (weekend project so may be a few weeks).
I have several 8820 wifi thermostats that I would love to be able to integrate into HA. Do you think the work you are doing will work for the 8820? The 8820’s I have are all using remote sensors if that matters. No real coding skills here but willing to help, and excited to see progress. Thanks!
