Sharing a Home Assistant App I built to control an Autoterm-family diesel heater from HA. originally built for a boat installation, but nothing about it is boat-specific.
How it works
A Raspberry Pi sits wired inline between the heater and its control panel (UART), owns both UART ports directly, to both read and inject commands. The App publishes everything to HA via MQTT discovery, so entities show up automatically no manual YAML needed.
Note: this requires physical wiring into the UART bus between heater and control panel. It’s not a Bluetooth/BLE sniffing approach. If you’re hoping for a wireless-only solution for a PU-28 panel, this isn’t that (though the protocol notes might still be useful).
Features
- Live status + control: start/stop, preheat, thermostat, power level
- MQTT discovery — entities appear in HA automatically
- Optional extended-telemetry decoding, selectable via a Heater profile setting
Model support
There is a profile for all autotherm/planar heaters so should work for all models but only testet against Autoterm 5D / Flow 5 (BINAR-5S)
If you try it on another model, I’d genuinely appreciate an issue report either way (works or doesn’t) that’s the fastest way to grow the confirmed list.
Install
Add the repository URL above as a custom repository in the HA add-on store, then install “Autoterm Heater Control” from the list. Full wiring diagram and config options are in the repo’s DOCS.md.