Controlling 303mhz ceiling fans?

Hardware
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I’ve been looking for solutions for controlling ceiling fans and lights that operate at 303mhz (https://fccid.io/CHQ9051T).

The summary of what I’ve found so far is:

  1. Many repurpose a remote and wire into the button terminals. Unfortunately, I have 4 fans and would rather not have to wire up 4 remotes!
  2. It’s much easier to find 433Mhz solutions, like the Sonoff RF Bridge.
  3. There’s the Bond Bridge, but it has a hard cloud dependency which I don’t like: https://bondhome.io/product/bond-bridge/
  4. 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.
  5. 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.

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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

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That’s a great find! I haven’t worked on this at all, but it looks like a good solution.

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I ended up using a Yard Stick One to control my Minka Aire ceiling fan:
Controlling a Minka Aire fan using rfcat, MQTT, and HA - Share your Projects! - Home Assistant Community (home-assistant.io)

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 :stuck_out_tongue: Pretty cool project actually.

EDIT: It was Adafruit that I ordered a Yard Stick One for about $100, without antenna.

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Wow, that’s great progress! Your writeup is nicely detailed. I still haven’t picked up a Yard Stick One yet, but hopefully sometime in the new year.

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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.

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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

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No need to buy expensive stuff to make this work.

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.

You can see more details on this post.

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That’s awesome! Thanks for sharing.

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.

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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.

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.

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. :smiley:

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.

Regards,

MCMLXXVII