I’ve been trying to get my TempurPedic ajustable bed integrated into my Home Assistant world, but not having any luck. I have an Ergo Plus, which has one of those RF (non bluetooth, non wifi) remotes. I bought a Broadlink RM4, which can work with both IR and RF. Using their app, I’ve had no luck getting it to work with the bed remote. It records the signal, but when I press the button on the app, nothing happens.
So I decided to try to see if using Home Assistant I might have more control of the signal being put out. I’ve integrated the remote into Home Assistant, and I’ve been able to use the remote.learn_command service to have it learn a bunch of IR codes from another device. That works great. However, even though the remote.learn_command has an option for RF instead of IR, it doesn’t seem to work. I looked online, and saw several tutorials about how you first have to use the RF signal using the Broadlink App, then bring it over using various tools. Before diving into this much further, I thought I’d ask if anyone has ever done anything similar. It may be that there’s just a fundamental incompatibility between the bed remote and the Broadlink device.
Hi. I actually managed to hack together a solution. But it involves taking apart the remote, soldering leads (two leads for each button on the remote) to it that then connecting all the leads to an ESP32 chip, a bank off/on relays and then putting whole mess into a hobby box. It’s doable, but you need to be comfortable soldering and wiring things up. I can send you more details if you like in a few days when I get back home. Lmk.
well, I did get it to work eventually, but it wasn’t pretty:
I bought an extra remote control and opened it up to access the circuit card. the buttons basically open and close switches on the circuit card. I soldered wires to each of the ends of each of the switches, and plugged them into a relay bank. I then control the relay with an ESP8266. Put the whole rats nest into an electronic kit box, and then repeat for the other bed (I have a split king). I power it with a standard USB power supply, and I use the ESPHome Add-on in Home Assistant to control it.
Works pretty well. Had to play a bit with the durations that I leave each switch closed, but that’s easily done with automations or with Node Red. I can provide more info if you’re interested. You need to have some familiarity with basic circuits (relays, soldering, etc.).
Here are a couple of pictures, one with the top on and one off. As you can see, the whole thing is powered by a single USB cable that plugs into the ESP. From there, you can pull power for the remote and the relays. I’ve attached amazon links for the various items I purchased. In addition to that stuff, I also bought an extra remote from TempurPedic, because I was afraid to screw up and break the remote when I was figuring out how the buttons worked.
The hardest part of the whole project was soldering onto the remote board. Once you take the plastic casing off the remote, it’s easy to see where the buttons are, and you can see the soldering pads on either side where you have to solder on to. They’re pretty small. What I did was take the wires, strip them just a little bit, and carefully attach them to the solder pads on the board. You need to be quick, because you don’t want the heat to spread and damage anything else on the board. Once you have a good connection, I used the silicon adhesive to hold everything down as well as to provide insulation.
From the remote board, the wires jump to the relays. The relays also connect to the output pins of the ESP. That’s how you will command them to open or close. When you command the relay to close, that closes the circuit and it is as if you pressed down on the button on the remote. Command the relay to open, and it’s as if you released the button.
You want to make a spreadsheet that goes from the pin number on the ESP, to the relay number, to the button on the remote. it’s tough to keep it all straight, and I messed up more than once.
The wire sets that I used (link below) are nice because they plug into the protoboard easily with the attached pins, and you can cut one end and strip them to solder to the remote board.
The ESP plug in for Home Assistant allows you to set up easy automations so you can mimic a momentary press of the button (close the relay, wait two seconds, open the relay), as well as a press and hold kind of action.
I did this as a project with my kids, to teach them a bit how this stuff works. Took us about a day with a lot of mistakes made along the way. We then built a second one (I have a split king, so two remotes), in just an hour or two.
The two boxes live under the bed, connected to two USB power supplies. I control the beds either through the Home Assistant app on my iPad, or through a couple of old Aeotec minimotes that I programmed to mimic the TempurPedic remote behavior.
and here’s a non-rotated picture of the inside of the completed box. You can see the three components, the remote card (upper left, you can see some of the wires soldered on to it), the relays (blue, to the right), and the ESP sitting on the protoboard (hard to see since it’s underneath all the wires on the lower left)
My bed just arrived so I have to decide if I want to go ahead with it. It is kind of fantastic that you went through all of that just to use an aotec remote.
I have the wifi version so it already integrates with google and Amazon so not sure it’s worth it although the voice commands are a bit heavy.
If you have the wifi version then I wouldn’t bother. You can probably just use the Alexa integration to access it from HA through Alexa.
I used that remote because it was laying around not doing anything. It’s not great but fits the job. What I really wanted was to be able to have the bed respond to home assistant, especially scenes. So I have a watch tv scene that moves the bed up, a sleep scene that makes it flat, etc. I’m also trying to figure out if I can detect snoring and automatically tilt the head up a bit
I’m not sure I understand your request. The coding part of this project is very straightforward. But before you get to that point, you need to build the ESP-based box I described in my first post.
Once you have that, the ESP86 website gives you templates that you can use to turn on an off the various GPIO pins on the chip. You will end up creating entities within the esp yaml file that will look like this:
switch:
platform: gpio
pin: 22
id: jean_head_down_pin
name: “Jean Head Down Pin”
interlock: [jean_head_up_pin, jean_leg_up_pin, jean_leg_down_pin, jean_preset_1_pin, jean_preset_2_pin, jean_flat_pin]
This entity creates a switch that when turned on, powers up pin 22 on the ESP chip, which in turn I connected to the “head up” contact on the bed remote that came with the bed.
Once you have that, it is very easy to assign a button on a remote to activate the right switch. In the example above, it would be switch.turn_on / switch.turn_off switch.jean_head_down_pin. Doing that would lower the head of the bed.
Thank you. That is exactly what I meant (how you referenced what gpio outputs triggered the relay board). I have never done a ESP86 project before. I simply want to emulate the “lay flat” button on our remote as part of our goodnight routine.Thank you again.
ah, ok, glad it helped. Note that for the flat bed command (at least on my bed), what you’ll have to do is to turn on that pin for a couple of seconds, then turn it off. Some of the other pins, like head/leg up/down, will make the bed keep moving until you turn them off. But the flat bed button, along with the preset 1 and preset 2 button, are different. They need to be flicked on, wait a few seconds, then turned off. Again, that’s on my bed, not sure about others.
I have the Tempur Ease 4.0 and also managed to learn the RF codes (433.92 precisely) with a broadlink RM4 pro but nothing happens when I use the broadlink app.
I know only one remote can be used at a time with this bed base, as I got 2 remotes. Maybe it doesn’t work cause broadlink would have to be “paired” to the bed base just like the remote. I tried to send the “pair” RF code with broadlink but that didnt work either.
Sorry for thread ressurection but i’m sure some people would be interested in finding a neat solution to this issue!
