iFan 02 with Google assistant

Configuration
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1

Going to apologize in advance if this has already been covered.

Home assistant changed the configuration of MQTT and it has been a nightmare since! Fans don’t work the way they used to.

The iFan has 4 relays. One for light. 3 for fan. Low, Medium, and High. I used to be able to ask google, “Set fan to medium/high/low.” and it would do what I asked respectfully. Now those words don’t work. and I have an 81 year old Grandfather, and a 52 year old Mother. They knew how it worked because it worked that way for YEARS. I’ve tried changing the configuration, Updating my devices to 9.5 Tasmota, Removing the YAML, using the tasmota integration, and even following another users post that made the “presets” become High/Medium/Low. But I can’t seem to get it back to the way it was.

How do I make this thing work the way it used to?! Do I just remove the fan controller and buy new ones that actually USE percentages?! I don’t want percentages…

My grandpa used to say, “Turn down the fan” and it would drop it a speed when it was on High, It would say “Turning UP the fan” but it would set it to medium. We thought it was strange, BUT IT WORKED.

Now it says “Setting fan speed to 88%” But that doesn’t work because 88 is closer to 100 than 66, and home assistant doesn’t drop the fan speed…

The whole thing has me angry and I’m tempted to just get in the attic and remove the modules and go back to pull strings! I don’t want any cloud based services involved, So I’m reluctant to go to lowes and get smart fan stuff there… How do I proceed?!

1 Like
2

I feel your pain.

I tried my best to get the decision reverted but I was unsuccessful.

Maybe the devs will hear about your elderly grandparents plight and realize that it’s not natural human speech to use percentages, especially for a standard three speed fan and might rethink that decision.

3

We can only continue hoping. I have no idea why they ever thought percentages were a good idea in the first place given that no fan ever has been controlled like that

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4

Is there no way to engineer the damn thing in the config to make that crap work? There has to be a way to make Google play nice like it is to… I’m tempted to replace the module, but not sure with what yet

5

It’s a HA issue, not the device. Maybe a work-around could be done using scripts to call the relevant speed percentages.

bedroom_fan.yaml

script:
  bedroom_fan_low:
    sequence:
      - service:  fan.set_speed
        data:
          entity_id: fan.bedroom_fan
          percentage: 33
  bedroom_fan_medium:
    sequence:
      - service:  fan.set_speed
        data:
          entity_id: fan.bedroom_fan
          percentage: 66
  bedroom_fan_high:
    sequence:
      - service:  fan.set_speed
        data:
          entity_id: fan.bedroom_fan
          percentage: 100

Google can then call those HA scripts when asked. It’s not as nice as the previous method but would hopefully be better than the current percentage nonsense. (warning: that code could have errors as I just wrote it on the fly)

6

I had considered this as an option, but turn up and down commands would be out of the question. Surely there is something that can be done to work around it…

7

You could create more scripts to cover the turn up / turn down commands as well… hacky.

Vote to bring back the old speed settings.

1 Like
8

Scripts can’t be called from Google home unless by me. Not sure why… my mom’s account can’t call a scene or script. Even though they are exposed. Not sure how to fix it. Would love some help from that too!!

9

I’m guessing that’s something to do with allowing guest users to control devices…? (assuming that your voice is the one that is registered against the Google account)

10

Correct. But the “guests” are in the Google home. As “residents” so to speak

11

Have you tried linking their Google accounts to the main ‘home’ so their voices are also linked?

12

Yup. They’ve been linked for ages. It stopped working a few months ago though! Not sure why!! Might need to delete everything and re link