Tried but when I added TCL skill in Yandex Home, no appliance from TCL appears in the Yandex App. Can you please share more details on how you make it work?
Thank you and looking forward to hearing from you.
Was able to add it to both google home and alexa. In GH, you can only turn on/off. In Alexa, you can also set the temperature. I wish there was a way to have more controls like the ones available in the TCL Smart Home app.
Because of this I was forced to make a monstrosity of a freakshow in home assistant.
Basically, home assistant sends a voice over text command to Google saying “turn on AC bedroom”, google turns it on and has an own automation that “when AC bedroom turns on” it sends a voice over text command to it’s self (because for some crappy reason HA entities are not directly ussable in automations in google home?) that turns on (or off) a HA input_boolean “AC bedroom”. HA also sends the content of an input_slider to ALEXA (because for some reason Alexa CAN set the temp and google can’t) setting the Temperature of the AC. I then made a generic climate device in HA with as state the input boolean, as temp the slider and as action a freaking input_button that when triggerd uses an automation to send a voice command to both google AND alexa. i’m even ashamed of writing this down as a “solution”. mike-drop, hackerman.
I have done this before with other devices, most recently my Solar Inverter, after I reverse engineered the protocol I created an ESP32 board that plugs into my inverter and interrogates/forwards to MQTT which works well with HA. I will be buying a TCL unit in the next week and get started with it. I am planning on buying model TAC-12CSHD/FAI, but I expect the protocol would be the same for all TCL Split Aircons. If anybody wants to follow along my status, let me know.
TCL Split Aircon bought and installed model TAC-13CSD/MEI2, and begun work on replacement dongle. I designed an ESP32 based dongle, for compatibility with ESPHome. First run of boards are being manufactured now, I expect delivery about Jan 5. In the meantime, I am working on capture/decoding the protocol between the original dongle and AC, and I should have the first cut of firmware complete by the time the boards arrive. The new dongle will work over wifi direct to HA, without contacting a server. My plan is to make the dongle available to whoever wants it at my cost.
Hi Dave,
your project sounds very interesting.
since I am not a programmer myself, I am very interested in the project.
It would be great if you could help me and the other TCL sufferers.
All the best, Hain
hope you can save us all