While USB SDR receivers that include 303Mhz support are easy and cheap to find, transmitters are both harder to find and more expensive. It almost seems like you’re looking at the hackrf which is $300USD+. Probably the most fun and flexible, but harder to justify. The YARD stick one may also work for this, at ~$150USD? I’d need to figure out a case though.
The really cheap “303Mhz” radio / transmitter pairs you can find online aren’t true SDR, and only let you send signals between the pair.
Any other solutions out there? I have pretty limited hardware / radio hacking experience, and I keep feeling like I’m missing something obvious here.
Don’t know if you’re still working on this, but I found another thread while searching for the same info. Might be useful for you. To the best of my understanding Hampton Bay remotes are made by the same company that makes Minka Aire’s. Hampton Bay Fan RF/MQTT bridge
Note that a good chunk of that $150 USD for the Yard Stick One might be because an antenna is included. I was able to find one closer to $100, without an antenna (I had a 433mhz antenna that works well enough).
I wanted to learn this anyway and had time over the holidays to play around. So I convinced myself the initial investment was worth it Pretty cool project actually.
EDIT: It was Adafruit that I ordered a Yard Stick One for about $100, without antenna.
I’ve been looking into this myself and gotten a little discouraged since I’m not really feeling like spending $150 for the Yard Stick One right now. Looking into it more, it seems this may be doable with ESP8266 and a radio chip you can get for ~$2USD on AlliExpress.
To help with the cost of the Yard Stick One, you can skip the antenna if you already have one. I purchased mine for $99 without since I already had the right antenna. I realize $99 is still a lot for essentially a remote control, but I use mine for other projects other than my Minka fan control
I also have a Hampton Bay RF controlled ceiling fan that works on 303.875 Mhz, so I got one of those generic 315 Mhz RF transmitters/receivers from Amazon (or even cheaper from AliExpress) for hooking it up to an ESP device (an already existing Sonoff Mini R2) and made it fully working with ESPHome (no MQTT involved at all).
If the 315 Mhz RF Transmitter doesn’t work for you out of the box, you’ll probably have to replace its SAW resonator with the correct one for that frequency. You can get those from AliExpress or from an old/non-working remote.
I ended up having severe reliability issues with my fans where the integrated LED kit would start flickering and be unusable. I’ve probably replaced them under warranty 6 times for the 4 I had installed. Now that they’re out of their 5 year warranty I’m replacing them with a totally different brand, without an integrated LED (which is getting hard to find). It’s a shame I spent so much time doing replacements that I never found the time to follow through on the above suggestions.
I used a Blue Series Smart Fan/Light Canopy Module | Inovelli along with a smart switch from them to add controls to the fan. Its only been a month, but so far it works incredibly well. The best part is unlike the 303mhz solutions, you can tell the state of the light in Home Assistant.
I ended up having severe reliability issues with my fans where the integrated LED kit would start flickering and be unusable. (…)
Sorry to hear about your bad experience with your ceiling fan’s led…
My ceiling fan is kinda old, so it originally had an E27 socket that I could only fit a single small led bulb, due to space constraints, and that didn’t provide much light for my living room. So, I replaced that socket with one of those led panel light from AliExpress (160mm, 24W 110v), which are kinda plug-and-play: You just need to retrofit the wiring and make sure the surface is flat enough for properly attaching the magnets.
Cool! It looks like a very polished solution with a nice looking smart dimmer!
I guess I’m too cheap for that kind of stuff - That’s why I keep doing my ghetto mods.
The best part is unlike the 303mhz solutions, you can tell the state of the light in Home Assistant.
Nice! That’s one of my concerns as well… I’m planing to use Home Assistant’s helpers for that, alongside adding a more reliable Superheterodyne type RF Receiver to my setup (there’s also another version with a built-in antenna board). That way, if someone uses the ceiling fan’s remote to change the fan state (either light, or fan speed) the RF Receiver would capture that and update the fan’s state properly in Home Assistant.
Hey, I’m currently researching ways of controlling old Hampton Bay fans in my house. My basic understanding is that the remote (UC7078T) uses radio (303.875 MHz), to transmit commands to receiver mounted in the canopy. The receiver then supplies power to the fan and lights based on input commands.
I’ve seen a bunch of posts of people using different approaches to try to mimic the remote, but it seems like a huge headache. Your solution seems different. Do I understand correctly, that you are effectively bypassing the canopy receiver with the Inovelli module? Does that let you control fan speed and brightness of the lights?
Yes, that’s it! However, the fan I used had no canopy receiver at all. It was very simple, wired and expecting all control to be through chains on the fan.
If it will work for your fans, at the least the Inovelli module will for sure fit in the space since there’s already room. I had to cross my fingers with mine and hope!
It also looks like your fan uses regular bulbs and not an integrated LED, which most fans are using these days (boo!). So, I don’t think you’d have any trouble.
I use a Broadlink rm4 pro to control my bathroom exhaust fan/light. Works like a charm right out of the box. I’ve got a couple more rm3’s around the house to control things like older TV’s or an electric fireplace.
You do have to create an account and setup the Broadlink App to register the device and use the Broadlink integration…at first, BUT once the integration is setup, you can remove the device from the Broadlink App and block access to your WAN in your router to make it completely localized. You get an annoying warning in the HA logs about it when you do that because it can’t phone home no more, but I filter it out using logger in the configuration.yaml file.
Thanks, I ended up ordering the blue Zigbee version and a blue wall switch. Will be getting it next week, and I’ll report back if it worked or not. It definitely looks like it should. I really like the solution since it’s completely local, allows physical control, and doesn’t require the system to infer the fan/lights state. The total cost was a little over $100 for both items.
The Inovelli blue zigby controller was the perfect fit for my particular fan. Thanks again for recommending it @deviantintegral. It took less than 30 minutes to remove old radio receiver and replace it with the new one. Pairing was even faster, Home Assistant detected it right away, and I was able to control both the speed of the fan and brightness of the lights immediately. The nice thing is I can finally turn my fan on, without having to turn the lights on as well (that’s how it used to be wired). Just ordered 4 more for my remaining fans. Here are before and after pictures:
Pretty cool project actually.
