LG Smart ThinQ - Component

LG, BOSH and SAMSUNG have been leading the way getting home appliances online and therefore smart.
All of them usually have one App to control their products. From Fridges and Washing machines to Air Conditioners. With all the integrations and components so far, I honestly was surprised an integration did not already exists. They are such big brand names and their “smart appliances” have been around for a while now.

Hence the request.

Please Integrate LG SMART THINQ appliances to work with HA.
I just recently bought a new LG fridge and in their App I can set the fridge temperature, start express freezing etc. Would like it to be able to monitor it via HA, to alert me when sudden drop in temperature or when the door is left open. It even works as a diagnostic tool for the fridge. Maybe that information can also be pulled.

I saw one more person looking for the integration, his however was for an LG Air Conditioner > LG Smartthinq Air Conditioning

LINKS:
Commerical page: https://www.lg.com/us/discover/smartthinq/thinq
LG has opened a dedicated website for its smart home platform SmartThinQ for developers. Developers can visit the site to apply for a partnership and can gain access to the platform’s application programming interface (API). http://thinq.developer.lge.com/en/discover/partnership/

More on the same topic:

Hey @Ice - did you get any further on this? We have a LG air con system about to be installed and of course i want to integrate to HomeAssistant.

I work for a big company with a very recognisable global brand name. I wonder if i apply from my work email for an API key if i will get further.

Updating this thread in case it helps anyone… in the last 2 months ive done quite a bit of research into this, including finally getting a hold of the right person at LG who knows what he is talking about (on his HVAC side of the fence anyway - perhaps less so on the home automation side, but thats ok as thats my job here and i think i can bridge that gap).

Options seems to be:
(I should note that my system is DUCTED system (B55AWY-7G5A). Not the standalone wall units, the advice is probably very different there)

1/ smart IR relay (such as sensibo.com). Sensibo is home-assistant capable (a ‘component’ has been written). For my AC unit, which is ducted, there is still some confusion is if could use this. Apparently not all wall control panels have an IR sensor… then theres always the risk that the sensibo doesn’t speak the exactly correct IR codes that my wall panel is expecting… wont know until i buy probably. But this should give you a LOT of control over all the functions (anything the IR remote can do basically), its cheap, and its low fuss.

2/ a dry contact switch setup. This is like hotel rooms where the A/C only springs to life when you flip a switch (such as inserting hotel keycard into slot). In our case the switch could be flipped by a z-wave switch (such as the Aeotec Z-Wave Nano Switch), which would complete the circuit on the LG dry contact switch (either PDRYCB400 or PDRYCB500, probably the 400). The 500 is modbus protocol, so i think this assumes you have a “thing” (not sure what exactly yet) that speaks modbus to your A/C system on one side, and something (z-wave? IP?) on the other side where home-assistant can plug into. There is modbus support in home-assistant i see (https://www.home-assistant.io/components/modbus/). This setup gives you control over MOST of the things you would probably need: on/off; temp; fan speed (on 500 only). More research needed is here. I have a bunch of docs the LG tech has sent that i need to spend some time understanding, if anyone wants to help me let me know! The LG tech has strongly advised this is the best and most reliable way to go. Ive attached a screenshot of the LG dry contact units, highlighting the ones relevant to us.

3/ get the LG wifi dongle (part: PWFMDD201). However if you go this path, i believe you can ONLY control your system with the LG App (update: it seems this might have changed now, ive yet to investigate though - see https://github.com/sampsyo/hass-smartthinq)… which if you are anything like me rubs me the wrong way, we of course wish to integrate with home-assistant directly so we don’t need to manage all those bespoke apps, one per vendor/device. The LG tech did tell me unofficially that integration is going to be opened up against google home and alexa “shortly” (his estimate 3 to 6 months) but i wouldn’t bet the house on this… and who knows where the home-assistant community would fall in on this decision - perhaps LG view us as too small a community to warrant the dev to open up an API for us.

Hope this helps someone.
Its a bloody vortex staring into this.
Cant believe how complicated this is, and how hard it is getting the right info.
Keiran.

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Thank you for your research and sorry for my late reply! I have not been able to focus much on my HA setup lately but I just ordered an LG Air Conditioner with Wifi control today :sweat_smile:. Sticking to the same brand even tough they yet have not “reveled” their API codes. I just don’t want a third brand into the mix. I thought I’d log back on and see how far HA and this thread has come.

I know there have been some attempts, some more successful then others, but a lot of head scratching involved by the looks over it.

Did you see this link?: In development: LG SmartThinQ component

If you can wrap your head around it, please do let me know.

Hey @Ice - good to hear you took the plunge and bought it. Ours is halfway installed (paused on account of this mess) with ducting in the roof etc, but no outside unit yet… so im locked into LG but wanted to sort out the automation side in my mind before pulling the trigger on the final half.

Ive also just decided last weekend to go for the wifi dongle. (based on the link in my post above to the github project - where if ive understood correctly one guy in the US has reverse engineered the app on his iPhone and been able to transfer that identity to his code, which home assistant invokes)

A mate talked me out of sensibo BTW due to the one-way nature of it. I.e. you tell sensibo to do things but LG doesn’t feed back to sensibo current state - which yeah makes sense (just like an IR remote) and sounds average.

So it sounds like we will be going through the teething problems together! Are you based in Oz? Im sydney.

And thanks for the link to that other thread. Id not seen that one no. Will absorb on the weekend.

Got the air con up and running. Running pretty well too. Consuming low energy compared to my old one, almost half tbh. They say using the new gas type “R32” is the way to go. For energy consumption and the environment. It uses less gas and therefore requires less energy to cool. Anyway, I’m still hoping for a simple generic component for SmartThinq products to integrate with HA. But it seems far away yet so close at the same time. @keiran.harris Did you get any closer after reading other posts? I also sent you a PM here on the forums regarding Discord. Did you get a chance to read that?

Using the LG SmartThinQ iOS APP is very bad to be honest. Extremely slow loading, updating and sometimes giving errors as if devices lost connection too. Devices are well within range and show good connectivity to the router.

You know you are preaching to the converted here. It is not home assistant that is dragging the chain. The HA devs seem to be open to any integration, even if it involves the cloud and hacking an api. It is companies like LG that make is difficult. Write to them. Get your friends to write to them. Start a petition. Make sure they can’t ignore you. See (in a different context) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho_(2006_TV_series)#First_season_2

Hey @Ice - yeah mine got fully installed on thursday last week and i love the unit. Not so much of a fan of the SmartThinq IOS app though - yes all the same dramas you mention here too, so you arent alone. Sadly. Ill check out the PM inbox sorry didnt know this forum had one TBH.

Next weekend i hope to play with HA integration. As mentioned that guy from new york seems to have hacked it, so it should just be a matter of porting his code over. Ill keep you posted !

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Just updating here - finally had some time and integrated my LG ducted system yesterday using ‘sampsyo’ github code, and its working great! seems more responsive TBH than using the LG SmartThinQ app (well, it couldnt really be worse!). See the top left panel for what it looks like and the controls i have available to it

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Oh wow, cool. Thanks I’ll start to look into that! Thanks a million

+1 here. I’d love to see this in the official repo. Looks like there is a pretty big effort required due to the way LG has built their API and devices.

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I just integrated into the awesome library, super impressed so far.

@keiran.harris did you custom build that control panel for the LG? I quite like it

Pretty easy actually! Theres an inbuilt panel type called ‘thermostat’ I think from memory. Just add that to the GUI and link it to your LG after sampsyo’s code has discovered it. Lemme know if you are still stuck.

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Worked immediately, thanks that was very straightforward and as everyone else has said, much better than the ThinQ app.

Add support refrigerator please))

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Has anyone managed to expose their ThinQ devices to Alexa? All my other entities sync just fine but this is the only one that doesnt seem to be showing up/ controllable by Alexa

Ours is a google home household, so nope, but for what its worth i have no problems controlling my LG A/C both from hass (using sampsyo code) and google home. I was a little worried one might lock out the other, but nope.

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Seems that after upgrading to HA 0.102.1 this problem solved itself and Immediately Alexa let me know about the climate device.