If your Midea offbrand AC (mine being EcoAir) Doesn’t have a WIFI port but has a CN3 port on it this is the tutorial for you.
Things you need:
- Basic Soldering Skills: This is much easier if you have an soldering iron as well as a hot air station.
- SLWF-01pro: I got mine on AliExpress since that was the best option for me.
- Midea Wifi Subassembly: They told me there was a 3 month backorder of this item but I ordered 4 of them anyway. Some how the items arrived just yesterday after only 2 weeks.
- Right angle 5 pin JST male? female? connector. I got mine on Amazon
- Bare wire female USB connector. Also from Amazon. You need this because the “USB” port on the WIFI subassembly is NOT a real USB port. It looks like one but its not. You need one with 4 wires!
Steps summary: You need to solder the right angle 5 pin JST connector to CN3. If you have a 0 ohm resister at J3 desolder that resistor and move it to J9. The resistor at J9 will connect 5V to the 5V pin of CN3, without a 0 ohm resistor there, your WIFI module will not get power. Next you need to solder the bare wire USB port to the back of the WIFI module PCB (Power to 5V, Data- to TXD, Data+ to RXD, and Ground to GND). Connect the SLWF-01pro to the your new USB port and your good to go.
Full Steps:
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Use your soldering iron to punch holes in the pin holes for the JST connector.
Next Solder the JST connector to CN3
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Check the back of your PCB and locate J3 and J9. There is a 0 ohm resistor at J3 for me and none at J9. You will need to desolder the resistor at J3 and resolder it to J9 (this will be difficult without a hot air station in my opinion). I’ve read that since this is a 0 ohm resistor, you actually dont need the resistor as long as you can bridge the pads at J9 together with a solder blob or a wire. Either way, you need to remove J3 for sure.
Location of J3 and J9
I made a mess since I’m shitty at soldering. -
Solder the bare wire usb port to the back of the wifi subassembly PCB. You can see that there are pins for 5V, TXD, RXD and GND on the PCB. My usb port wires are: Red is Power, White is Data -, Green is Data +, and Black is Ground. So I will connect the Red wire to 5V, White to TXD, Green to RXD, and Black to GND.
Once again a mess =(. I would highly suggest using some kind of mask to prevent the wires from shorting each other, but I don’t have such a thing and just left it be. -
Hook things back up to your AC unit and connect the slwf-01pro to the usb port. Follow instructions to setup SLWF-01Pro and go to home assistant to add it to your ESPhome.
Thats all!