Hi all,
I have created a switch to turn on my AC with Broadlink RM3 according to temperature.
from time to time, family members in the house will not use home assistant to turn on the AC but will use the AC remote.
the problem is, that when a family member uses the manual remote, the switch in home assistant will not be affected.
is there a way to overcome this, so the switch in home assistant will be in the correct state even when the AC remote is used?
thanks in advance.
AFAIK, there should be something that will tell that the manual command took the control. So your device should know when the AC has been manipulated by its remote control. Perhaps just a IR receive that sense the RC of the AC and inform HA of that.
If you are familiar with arduthings (or even better a Wemos) you might be able to make such interface. Such device should grab the IR command from the RC and hijack it to HA.
Other ways around I think wouldn’t suffice to solve your issue.
Hide the remote from them and provide something else to control the temp that goes via HA (eg. Ikea Tradfri remote).
The reason I say this is because AC remotes normally send every command when you press one button - if you press “temp up” they send “temp at 24, fan high, eco on, etc, etc.”. So even if you capture the IR in real time from the remote, there will be too many combinations to deal with.
Try using this component. It allows for a switch entity to be coded in to provide feedback to HA. Generally people have been using a door/window sensor on the A/C vent louver to determine if the unit is on or off.
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If HA is on a RPi, it might do the job directly by using its GPIO.
Then It should take just a small device to receive the IR (usually a TSOP48, may suffice).
As far as it is suggested to use smartIT, then that is also an economic solution, whether the HA is on the IR line of sight.
I don’t see much difficulties to decode the IR informations. Just to plug the small board on the Arduino IDE, then it will be easy to load the IR library and find a suitable code snippet to adapt for the use. Of course it’s not everybody business 
But commonly it will take to grab all IR command and save them in an array.
The OP is using a Broadlink RM device already so doesn’t need the HA RPi near (in line of sight) to the A/C if using SmartIR and a door/window sensor for feedback.
Thats a great suggestion.
but it more suitable for small A/C where you you have a moving vent and you can sense it.
im talking about main house A/C, where it have static windows outputs scattered in the house so i can sense any moving parts , only wind coming out.
In this case you could still use SmartIR but instead of the window/door sensor, use power monitoring of the main unit…or perhaps a custom made (Wemos D1 mini running ESPhome for example) with a sensor to detect air flow in the main duct
@sparkydave
I feel like you are getting to my opinion 
This library would get the things going in a little effort
Or if you want to get it integrated to HA a lot easier, I’d go with ESPhome and it’s IR transmitter component since it integrates perfectly with HA via the API. But as I mentioned before, the OP already has the IR transmitter and is just wanting a way to get feedback from the A/C which is why SmartIR is the perfect option, once a method for determining it’s on/off status is sorted out (personally I’d go with power monitoring, which can again be done with ESPhome with the current clamp sensor).