Chromagen Midea 170L Heat Pump Hot Water System - Modbus Integration Success

I received my EW11 about a week ago and have been trying to get it working, but so far without any success.

I’m fairly certain that the wires labeled A and B are not the Modbus connection, but are only powering the display. I measure a constant ~10 V AC on those terminals.

When I connect P and Q to the A and B terminals of the EW11, nothing happens when I try to scan for registers (using your Python script). I also tried swapping the wires, but unfortunately that didn’t change anything.

When measuring the voltage between the P and Q terminals, I see it jump to about 3 V and then drop back to zero after a few seconds. This cycle repeats roughly every 5 seconds. When I measure between P and E (yellow wire), or Q and E, I get about half that voltage. Because of this, I’m fairly confident that the yellow wire (E) is ground.

I also found a Reddit post (where I believe you commented as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/Esphome/comments/1009nsg/modbus_logger_midea_chromagen_heat_pump_hot_water/?show=original) showing a picture of a PCB that looks very similar to mine. In that image, the display connects to two PCB connectors that are not labeled. However, the picture also shows another connector (CN21) exposing P, Q, and E, with “to computer” written underneath it.

I checked my schematic and CN21 is not shown there. However, it does appear to exist on my PCB, just without a connector soldered onto it.

Do you think the PQE connection going to the display is the same as the missing CN21 connector? It seems like a big coincidence that PQE would be labeled in the schematic as going to the display, yet not be the Modbus connection.

Do you have any ideas on how I could move forward from here? I really want to get this working, and any help would be greatly appreciated.

My Claude investigation says the PQE connector should be the proper modbus connection but is often unpopulated on the pcb.
The connection to the screen is different.
Presumably you don’t have enough hands to reliably hold wires on there for testing so it looks like you might need a soldering iron too

regarding the PCB picture: you would have to mount both, CN21 and IC6. IC6 is obviously something like the good old MAX485, but as we don’t know if the supply voltage is 3.3V or 5V, you better use something like an SN65HVD1780P. All the rest seems there. Soldering will be no fun as there is coating on the board… Keep us tuned!

I totally missed the of below the CN … And having taken a closer look at my own photo, it looks like IC1 is connected to IC6 as well. Should i solder a chip there as well and which one?