First of all, thank you so much for taking the effort to answer and help me out with this. It’s so much appreciated. It took some time to answer, since I wanted to investigate further and give more information. I contacted the supplier, the reseller… No answers from that side. I tried to take clear pictures, but the control panel is unreachable. You can see something on the pictures.
The control panel is a Balboa VL801D. balboa VL801D - Google Search
You can connect it to the J1 or J2 of the balboa controller GS510DZ unit. It seems like those jumpers are more than only a connection for IR. On the (bad) pictures, you can see that it uses all 8 cables in de RJ45 connector.
It’s probably a bad idea to connect a network cable from J2 to the Elfin and see what happens?
Imagine that it is that simple…
Thanks for sharing the pics. It would have been nice if they had only terminated 4 of the connections so we knew which wires to play with
I wouldn’t try just plugging it in. It would be nice if it worked but dumping the 16VDC pin into anything other than the power input is likely to let out the magic smoke. I’d get an RJ-45 breakout board and a multimeter and start testing. Take a look at the WHAT IF I’M UNSURE? section of Balboa board protocol - Google Docs for the testing procedure. You should be able to track down a ground, V+ at around 15VDC and two other pins that read around 7-12VDC (they will flick on and off so you’ll have to watch closely). They will always be opposite of each other.
If you can find out power and data pins, it’s okay if you get the data pins wrong on the first pass. You can just swap them. Let me know how it goes!
Just received that RJ-45 breakout board and planned to read out the J1 port.
Damn, back to the drawing board. Thank you, netmindz for letting me know.
That looks quite complicating if you compare it with the Elfin RS485 solution.
I’m afraid it will be too difficult for me, using a OR-gate and a Wemos D1…
I don’t think this has anything to do with bwalink. If you have MQTT properly configured in Home Assistant, the tub should just show up as a new entity.
Hello. I am brand new to this and am in the process of buying a device (HP t630) to get Home Assistant up and running.
I have Balboa Hot Tub and have installed the Balboa WiFi module which works great. I can control my hit tub (out it in and out of rest mode via the Balboa app).
I also have solar panels controlled by Huawei Fusion Solar inverter and the Huawei Fusion Solar app.
My dream is so set up Home Assistant to achieve the following:
When I state exporting electricity to the grid home assistant moves my hot tub from REST Mode to Ready Mode. When I stop exporting electricity to the grid Home Assistant moves my hot tub back to REST Mode.
Is this possible? Can Home Assistant move a Balboa app from rest to ready mode and visa versa?
I have a Caldera Capitolo spa and am hoping to integrate into my solar PV as above.
I’ve opened up the control box and looked at the board but can’t find any reference to the make or model of the control board. I can see an 8 pin connector (only first 6 wires used) connecting to the remote control panel. There is another 8 pin header labeled Peripheral Interface which may be useful? Theres also a USB port.
I have the wifi module but it goes unavailable some times. Is there a solution to this or do you have to delete it and reconfigure it everytime this happens?
I have a cron job setup to restart the docker container nightly. I’m sure there is a far more graceful way to do this but a one liner gets the job done.
I’m unable to start the service, no exit code either, Initially i thought it was my Pi zero W, so tried a 3B+ with bullseye and get the same issue, anyone else had this?
The unit bwa_mqtt_bridge.service has entered the ‘failed’ state with result ‘exit-code’.
Mar 05 12:52:28 raspberrypi systemd[1]: Failed to start Balboa Spa MQTT Bridge.
░░ Subject: A start job for unit bwa_mqtt_bridge.service has failed
░░ Defined-By: systemd
░░ Support: Debian -- User Support
░░
░░ A start job for unit bwa_mqtt_bridge.service has finished with a failure.
░░
░░ The job identifier is 25395 and the job result is failed.
Thanks for sharing your hot tub automation project. It’s great to see people using open source projects like 311 to improve their hot tub experience. I’ve been wanting to do something similar for my own spa, but I’m not as tech-savvy as you. Your post has inspired me to give it a shot! On another note, I recently tried out some spa procedures from onsitemedspa.com and they were amazing. It’s cool how technology can enhance our relaxation experience both inside and outside of the hot tub.
This project is great to control the hot tub remotely. Would anyone know how to implement this project on M-Class Gecko or Artic Spa control boards. According to the patent these boards have RS-485, but no documentation is available. Thanks.
Thanks @DMqRS-485. As they say, “on the shoulders of giants”. The protocol would need to be decoded first unless they happen to use the same protocol as Balboa.
Open a feature request with the BWA upstream repository. I’ve been thinking the same but as a number instead of a slider. A climate entry would be even better!
