Minuet: A smart BLDC motor controller for the Maxxfan

ESPHome
1

TL;DR: I designed a replacement circuit board for the MAXXAIR Maxxfan to use a brushless DC fan motor. It runs ESPHome and integrates with Home Assistant over WiFi. Great for campervan automation. :blue_car:

I’ve been discussing Minuet with folks on the Sprinter Source forum in this thread. I’m sharing it here because I think folks in the Home Assistant and ESPHome community might be interested and I’ve seen posts from several other folks who have automated their MaxxFans in other ways.

Project home page: GitHub - j9brown/minuet: A smart brushless DC motor controller for the MaxxAir Maxxfan Deluxe vent fan
YouTube videos: playlist

Why Minuet?

I was tired of my Maxxfan squeaking and cleaning it out never seemed to help for long. This seems to be a common problem among owners of this fan. The original fan motor’s carbon brushes wear and scrape against the commutator and that makes it squeak. So I fixed the problem.

I found a suitable BLDC motor for the fan, designed a circuit board to drive the motors with an ESP32-C3 for smarts, made adapters for mounting the motor in place non-destructively, wrote some code, gave it a whirr, and basked in glorious silence! As a bonus, I integrated my fan with Home Assistant to control it from anywhere and I attached environmental sensors to monitor indoor air quality.

I’ve called my new fan controller Minuet as a cheeky pun on “Maxx” because it’s minimally noisy. :wink:

Soon you’ll be able to make one too if you want. Minuet completely replaces the original circuit board and runs ESPHome so you can configure it to work however you want: with or without WiFi, standalone or with Home Assistant, and with accessories of your choice.

I have open sourced the Minuet hardware, software, and documentation so that folks can reproduce the project and help me make it better. There’s still a lot of work to do before it’s ready for the general public. If there’s enough interest and help from contributors, maybe we could make a kit!

Yesterday I finished the second revision of the Minuet hardware design and it is now feature complete. It supports more powerful fan motors, IR remote control, wall controls, rain sensor, thermistor, piezo buzzer for (polite and configurable) audible feedback. I’ve just ordered the circuit boards and hopefully it is closer to a final version that other folks can use.

I hope you find this useful!
Jeff.

2 Likes
2

Oh, awesome! I have been pondering replacing the controller and motor in my fans just recently so this will be great! :grinning:

1 Like
3

Hahah, oh what timing. Just got back from a trip and my stupid fan started squeaking. I was just about ready to rip it apart and see what I could come up with that also integrated into HA. I hated it constantly being out of sync when someone uses the controls on the fan itself. This is rad and i am happy to help in any way. Thanks!

1 Like
4

Awesome! I’m testing the new v2 boards and they seem promising. Another couple of iterations should do it. Last night I finished reverse engineering the IR remote protocol (for folks who want to keep using their remote).

Which model fan and accessories do you have?

5

That is so cool to hear. I stated following your other thread too on the sprinter forums. I don’t actually know which model I have as I didn’t do the install, but it has a remote (white), buttons on the fan itself and the ability to use the wall control. Also has a dome so it could be the deluxe. Accessories is a long list but here is a nutshell.

Rixens heating/hot water
Houghton AC
Victron system with 600AH and 300W solar
Starlink
And of course, my little n100 server running proxmox (HA, Plex, etc).
I am also using a peplink router with built-in cellular.

1 Like
6

Nice kit! I was only asking the Maxxair accessories like the wall remote. So good news is that the latest prototype of Minuet supports all of that stuff!

7

Oooohhhh. Sorry, I get excited about vans. I don’t use anything accessory wise. tossed the remote in a box. I currently control it with IR using a ESP360 but it gets bumped and unplugged sometimes. Looking forward to just embedding the ESP!

1 Like