Controlling Sunsa's new RF Wands in Home Assistant

Hardware
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Hi all,
For the longest time I have begged Sunsa to give us local API access to control their first gen WiFi powered Wands, and it felt like my requests were falling on deaf ears. Well, to my surprise, Sunsa did something else, it is a move in the right direction which is them releasing the Gen 2 wand which ditches Wifi altogether for an old school RF radio with 15 channels.

I couldn’t help myself and I bit the bullet and bought an 8-pack as I at least have the confidence that if Sunsa were to seize existing tomorrow, and my Wifi wands stop working as they won’t be able to phone their cloud API, I at least have these local RF-only wands to replace them with.

I finally got around installing one just to test and it worked quite well. They did a very good job streamlining the setup process. There’s an Admin and User mode and a Channel 00 which allows you to control all channels at once.

The only missing piece is now, how do I integrate them with Home Assistant. I have dabbled with Tasmota, and I also have a Zigbee mesh running with Zigbee2MQTT and a bunch of paired devices. The only thing I have not messed with and have zero knowledge on is RF devices, and where to begin in figuring out how to make them work within Home Assistant.

I have done some research and know that there are RF radios out there and I believe there’s a way to flash a specific chip in order to siphon all of the radio codes, record them and be able to play them back. Sort of how old school garage openers work when you pair them to a car or a new fob, etc.

Issue is, there’s so much information out there and some of it is about 5+ years old. So I wanted to ask here to see what are the recommended hardware/software/steps to do the following:

  1. Record/Sniff the RF Radio codes that the Sunsa remote controller is pushing out to the wands.
  2. Store that recording and bind it to a command
  3. Play those codes on demand as commands within HA

Once I get to that point, I can setup my own automations, toggles, etc. within HA. But I am stuck with these steps above and could use all the help and guidance I can get here.

Thank you all.

EDIT: Just adding some color as to what I have researched so far:

  • Broadlink RM4 Pro (Ideally, I would love a PoE or Ethernet powered solution but this Wifi one should work for the time being)
  • Sunsa wands according to the website do support 433MHz
  • Developer Mode > Service (To learn commands)
  • Scripts to bind commands to a usable entity

I plan on pulling the trigger on an RM4 Pro and begin this journey. I just don’t know if there are any gotchas in 433Mhz support or if it’s just a universal protocol.

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Assuming your remote is actually using 433Mhz and not something close to it, the Broadlink should be enough to get you going.

Just watch out for rolling codes, where the code keeps changing even when you press the same button. Sunsa don’t mention this, but they do say that the RF signal is “encrypted”.

3

Bingo! That was my main and primary concern when I started digging into it. I don’t imagine there are any other solutions out there that can handle the more sophisticated 433Mhz situations outside of the RM4 Pro.

Like they say, you won’t know until you try. For $40 on Amazon I am willing to take a chance. I will happily report back as I am not seeing any posts around this online. Hopefully it can help future automators that are considering doing the same.

I was joking with my wife, worst case scenario, I will get one of those button-presser bots and automate that if nothing else works. All kidding aside, if I have to solder relay wires to the remote I will do it! :joy:

4

Esphome can handle learning/sending rf codes, so that’s also an option if you’re willing to diy it.

Other than that, your worst case scenario solution is close enough. You could get a spare remote & solder an esp board to the buttons to “press” them.

There are forum threads detailing both solutions above here. I suggest you search around for inspiration if you need to go down that route.

5

Afaik RM4 pro doesn’t handle FSK modulation. If your wand uses FSK (non rolling/non encrypted), you still have few options.

Relay is not the best component for that approach.

6

Care to elaborate on an alternative then?

7

Sure. Send some good photos of the remore control circuit board.

8

Almost two years ago they told me that they’d be adding Matter support for the current WiFi wands via firmware. Still to be seen.

9

Any luck with this?