Hi all,
To save anyone else having the trouble I’ve had most of today - figured I’d register an account and post.
I’m using 3 Haier AC units all running R_1.0.00/e_2.3.12 firmware, originally connected to SmartAir2.
I was having strange issues where my ESP8266 was sending all of the right commands and my ESPHome logs showed polling messages, but for some reason I’d never be able to use the integration as I would hit an error “No action, first poll answer not received” when trying to adjust the state of the A/C.
I spent some time debugging, and realised while sniffing with a UART that upon connecting the RX pin to my ESP8266, I was triggering the over-voltage snap-back circuit, which was grounding out the RX pin.
Basically, I could see response messages from my air-conditioner when only the UART was connected to the serial interface, but as soon as the ESP was connected too - dead silence.
Investigating Instalator’s circuit schematics I could see he was running RX through a series of voltage drop resistors. This wasn’t enough to resolve the issue for me, and I ended up testing with a SN74ahct125n level shifter - immediately started to work, but these are large quad channel units I had laying around and I needed two - one for RX and one for TX.
I’ve since ordered a sparkfun logic level converter with the BSS138 mosfets on board which are bi-directional. A single one of these boards should sort out my issues once and for all.
TL;DR: if you’re having issues with this integration not receiving response messages and you’ve tried a few different Haier.h file versions, you likely need a level shifter like I did.