Aprilaire Thermostat 8800 any MODBUS experts?

Can you share what documentation you referenced?

I also have a 6000 series. Is there any way to get your work into Home Assistant? I am not a developer but can test and report my findings.

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 donā€™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.

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The Wifi programmers guide is what I have, and so far it has applied to my 6003 unit.

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 :slight_smile:

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. Itā€™sā€¦ not great. But, itā€™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 havenā€™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 doesnā€™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 ā€˜meā€™ problem.

Brian

Iā€™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 didnā€™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).

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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 8820ā€™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!

This is exciting! Iā€™ve been trying to get the wifi kit for months now! Canā€™t wait to see the git page once it is up! Iā€™ve been on the fence with replacing my Aprilaire system just because it wonā€™t integrate with the house/system.

Out of curiosity is it Local Polling/Pushing? Or is it talking to the Aprilaire Servers and making a bunch of API requests?

If youā€™d like to have a look at the Github, it is here: GitHub - chamberlain2007/aprilaire-ha If you want to try it out, you can add it to HACS and run through the integration flow with the IP.

Please note that the biggest concern I have right now is regarding stability. You may experience a connection drop and/or data not updating, which could require restarting the thermostat. I am working through some options around this. If you want to give it a try please do, but this is definitely not completed or bug free, and I may push breaking changes at any time. If youā€™d prefer to wait until it is stable and fully ready for use, I will certainly let this thread know.

It is using local push. There is very minimal network traffic (a couple of bytes of data to update and when a change of state is triggered on the thermostat). There are some instances in which it will send a request to the thermostat to send back an asynchronous response with current data, however this is again on the order of a few bytes of data. It does not communicate with Aprilaireā€™s servers and does not require any external network access.

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Yes it should be compatible with the 8820. If/when you install and test there may be some different options from my own, but the protocol is the same, so I would request that you provide some requests/responses from the log if there is anything I need to look at. As mentioned in the previous comment, this is still very much in development so if you are a less technical user, you may want to wait until it has achieved a bit more stability.

I just got it set up! So far so good! Amazing Job!!!

Iā€™ll be poking around the code to see how it actually works, this is very exciting!

@chamberlain2007 Are you good with PRs? Currently the branch is locked down so I canā€™t submit one. I made a local branch that may address one of the errors in the logs. Python isnā€™t my main language but Iā€™ll hopefully be able to contribute to some bug squishing.

Hi, definitely open to pull requests. You should be able to fork the repo and create a PR from your fork back onto the main repo. Ping me in DM if that doesnā€™t work.

To provide a little insight the interface was locked down late summer of 2021 based on a security report I filed. Aprilaire's Insecure API - YouTube

Their thermostats were open to the entire world without authentication.

Hello, where do I go to turn on home automation mode? I took a look at my thermostat (6000 series) and canā€™t seem to find it.
Edit: is this it?

Does this mean that if you use the integration that you cannot use the Aprilaire app?

where do i find ip for thermostat i cant seem to find it

Yes that is the setting. I believe you should be able to still use the app, I have been using both without issue, they use different protocols.

Iā€™m sure itā€™s in the settings somewhere, but I would check on your router as youā€™ll want to assign a static IP regardless.