Hi! I bought this 4-in-1 Bathroom Exhaust Fan from Amazon a few months back and I wanted to know if anyone had any luck trying to make it work with Home Assistant.
I tried the remote control but it doesn’t use IR or RF, as far as I know; nor I could find more info on this unit. Maybe it uses Bluetooth to connect to the unit? I’m not sure how to check. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Any FCC-ID on the packaging or the unit itself? How about the user guide? Surely it will have something in the specifications?
It may be using BlueTooth or BLE. The advert does say BlueTooth, and the comments talk abut a built-in BlueTooth speaker, but they may be using BLE which is far more battery efficient, and doesn’t need to obtain a session, and can rely on advertisements. Be aware that a lot of BLE devices will only support one connection at a time, so no phone and HomeAssistant control at the same time.
Nordic have a lot of tools on their website to analyse signals and get the respective UUIDs etc for reverse engineering. Have you looked if there are vendors with similar looking units with the same number of buttons and there is an integration already available for HomeAssistant? Often the electronics can be the same, just the plastics is different shape. Otherwise you have a little bit of data collection and interpretation ahead of you.
You may get lucky and the control data is not encrypted, and is consistent. In which case a simple ESP32 connected to ESPHome may be an easy interface for automation - just listen and transmit the same codes for the same outcome. You may also be able to use the same ESP to snoop in the first place, to get the respective codes for reverse engineering. Hooking up the speaker to MusicAssistant will be a natural progression from there, being able to sing along in the shower and change the song with voice recognition…
Hint: Be mindful that using ChatGPT and other AI resources to help may not be effective, the BlueTooth/BLE code changing often for ESPHome and the bots not always up-to-date, and serving you outdated slop that will cause you much grief. Go back to the original documentation for the latest up-to-date information, rather than rely on YouBoob videos and random posts from unknown sources like Reddit. Best you understand how it all ties together rather than guessing and hoping it eventually works.
Keep us posted on progress.
