Midea Mini Split Wifi Support

⚙️ Custom Apps and Drivers Custom Drivers
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Hi guys, I just got installed a new Mini split with a WiFi adapter. it's a Midea based AC.

I learned that they make machine for a LOT of brand, like Hualing, Senville, Klimaire, AirCon, Century, Pridiom, Thermocore, Comfee, Toshiba, Carrier, Goodman, Friedrich, Samsung, Kenmore, Trane, Lennox, LG and more! there all use the same WiFi device.

It seems to be a Huge player on that market, and I Wonder why nobody make a Hubitat driver for them?

I found some projects that work with Home Assistant, but I would like to keep everything within Hubitat. a more robust and capable platform.

Is anybody here interested to work on that project? I wish i was a programmer but I don't have this skill ;/

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Can you share links to the Home Assistant details? That would help to gauge complexity and whether it is possible to port or implement support for Hubitat.

EDIT: this seems potentially relevant -- GitHub - andersonshatch/midea-ac-lib: Library for controlling Midea AC devices via their cloud</ti

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Hi tomw thanks for the reply,
This project currently works with my device without having to use the Midea clouds

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Cool, thanks for the link.

It's a little bit confusing because it looks like that developer added local support into an existing cloud integration, so some of the interfaces that he emulated seem weird.

I don't think the discovery mechanism will work with Hubitat because it seems to rely on broadcast UDP requests and replies.

But if you already know the IP address of your AC unit, these seem to be the pertinent parts. Maybe the Hubitat rawSocket interface could do the job?

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yeah we need to provide the IP address, ID, a Token and Key

those are easy to retrieve using midea-discover as instructed on the mac-zhou's project page

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Subscribing, in case someone posts a solution that uses the Midea controller bus and not the wifi/cloud USB dongle that doesn't work with my particular unit.....

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I just want to chime in with my support for this project. I recently installed a Pioneer Mini Split & have the WiFi USB dongle setup. Problem is that I’m on a particularly horrible HughesNet satellite connection (cloud connections suck for everything on my system) & would love to automate with Hubitat. I have been able to get the mac-zhou app up and running on HA, so at least I have a little bit of extra local control over the midea, but the MQTT app written by @kevin that I had used as a go-between for HE & HA in the past isn’t yet working for thermostats & climate devices.

I now know local commutation is possible, so I’m hopeful that someone will come through for those of us with midea’s. Can’t wait to be able to automate my home’s heat & AC with the rest of my system.

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I'm trying to put something together for Hubitat based on the mac-zhou projects.

It's sort of slow-going, because the data encoding and encryption are complicated and I don't have a midea device to test with. Will keep you all posted with anything I get to a point of being worth sharing.

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This is amazing! Thank you so much for the effort. I’ll be happy to provide any testing support & feedback that I can.

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Also subscribing to this thread

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I posted my Hubitat driver integration for Midea AC units here:

I also listed it in my HPM repo.

This one was really challenging and fun to put together. Thanks to @etienne and @ghgeiger for all of the help with testing and debugging.

This driver uses the Hubitat raw socket interface, which has some unique quirks and challenges. Please post in this thread if you have any issues or requested improvements.

FYI @jasonp9

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Can confirm that this driver is working great on my Pioneer Inverter++ mini split.

Huge thanks to @tomw who did the heavy lifting & ported this code into a functional Hubitat driver without even owning a unit to test on, and also a huge thanks to @etienne for initiating this thread and providing their testing! I'm so happy to be able to automate my heat and AC now!

Just in case there are others out there who don't even know that they own a Midea AC, here's a bigger list of brands that re-brand Midea units under their own name:

Hualing, Senville, Klimaire, AirCon, Century, Pridiom, Thermocore, Comfee, Alpine Home Air, Artel, Beko, Electrolux, Galactic, Idea, Inventor, Kaisai, Mitsui, Mr. Cool, Neoclima, Olimpia Splendid, Pioneer, QLIMA, Royal Clima, Qzen, Toshiba, Carrier, Goodman, Friedrich, Samsung, Kenmore, Trane, Lennox, LG and much more
(quoted from mac-zhou's github for midea-ac-py, an integration for Home Assistant)

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What kind of device connects to the controller bus, @vreihen?

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FWIW, @vreihen, and you may have already seen this, but on the following thread there is discussion of the hardware involved to bypass the USB slot. It involves an ESP01 and a voltage converter, and iirc towards the end of the thread someone was selling extra builds. There's an integration for HA that is linked in the thread for that hardware.

This might work for you if there's a way to tap into similar circuitry & if so, maybe someone can port this driver to work with that setup.

P.S. this is the thread that originally got me interested in local control on the HE, as this is where the local midea integration into HA, that @tomw used to make the HE driver, was originally posted.

ETA (because the link didn't line up quite right): There's a pretty good discussion of this harware around post 358, but it's worth scouring the entire thread for details.

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I am clueless here about this step.

Follow the instructions on this page to install and execute the midea-discover utility:

Ok, I go that link, and then what? I don't get what I am supposed to download, run, or whatever? I don't see a file or anything to download? I have to be totally missing something here...

And edit to say, I am not trying to do this through Hubitat, I was looking for something to run on my desktop.

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What kind of computer are you running it on? You need something that can run Python. Linux is most familiar to me. I ran it on a Raspberry Pi.

You need Python 3. It's likely installed by default if you are on Linux. Then you may need to install pip3. This is a useful reference for that: https://www.linuxscrew.com/install-pip

Once you have pip3 running, the two command line steps in your screenshot under How to Use are next. Then you go back to my instructions from there.

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I just want to add that this was the sticking point for me as well. I also ran it on an RPI, but python 3 was not installed by default on my Raspberry Pi OS distro. I think that this should be an environment you can install on any OS & once you get that installed, you can use pip3. pip3 is a python software distribution & installation tool. With the commands on the midea-msmart page, it will install the msmart package. and once msmart is installed, you can run midea-discover.

Luckily this is a one time deal, you only need this to get the required information to enter into the driver.

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I think Midea calls them the XYE terminals. There are several options (don't look at the prices!) to convert XYE to various hospitality/commercial building controller busses:

https://www.intesis.com/products/ac-interfaces/midea-gateways/midea-ac-brand-solution

https://orient-hvac.com/product/Modbus-BMS-gateway-CCM-18A.html

At least from the descriptions, this seems like a more universal way to interface to the AC unit. Price of these interfaces is a different story...although it doesn't seem like something that can't be done with an ESP32 and some circuit breadboarding.

My unit is a Pioneer RYB series ducted, which is their mini-split ductless hardware mounted in a small air handler. It comes with a wall-mounted thermostat, as well as a separate temperature/status/IR receiver display that looks like it was intended to be installed in an indoor ductless unit. Pioneer's tech support said the only remote control option is IR, and that there is no internal USB port for the wifi module.

Midea's model number for this unit is DLFSD, and their web site is claiming that they now have a wifi module for their version that includes hardware to add the missing USB port:

https://www.shareddocs.com/hvac/docs/1009/Public/00/IM-KSAIF04-02.pdf

I'll have to investigate this further, although I still think that (price aside for the current commercial offerings) interfacing to the unit's bus is the better option and obviously keeps everything local.....

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Thanks for getting this together!!!

I’m a super novice when it comes to RPi.

This is what I’m getting when I run it. I’m sure I’m missing something.

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Mine looks slightly different (with a couple of extra dependencies, which seems weird):

pi@pibeacon:~ $ sudo pip3 install msmart
Looking in indexes: https://pypi.org/simple, https://www.piwheels.org/simple
Requirement already satisfied: msmart in /usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/msmart-0.1.35-py3.7.egg (0.1.35)
Requirement already satisfied: click in /usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/click-8.0.1-py3.7.egg (from msmart) (8.0.1)
Requirement already satisfied: ifaddr in /usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/ifaddr-0.1.7-py3.7.egg (from msmart) (0.1.7)
Requirement already satisfied: pycryptodome in /usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/pycryptodome-3.10.1-py3.7-linux-armv6l.egg (from msmart) (3.10.1)
Requirement already satisfied: pycryptodomex in /usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/pycryptodomex-3.10.1-py3.7-linux-armv6l.egg (from msmart) (3.10.1)
Requirement already satisfied: requests in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (from msmart) (2.21.0)
Requirement already satisfied: importlib-metadata in /usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/importlib_metadata-4.8.1-py3.7.egg (from click->msmart) (4.8.1)
Requirement already satisfied: typing-extensions>=3.6.4 in /usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/typing_extensions-3.10.0.2-py3.7.egg (from importlib-metadata->click->msmart) (3.10.0.2)
Requirement already satisfied: zipp>=0.5 in /usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/zipp-3.5.0-py3.7.egg (from importlib-metadata->click->msmart) (3.5.0)
pi@pibeacon:~ $ sudo midea-discover
INFO:msmart.cli:msmart version: 0.1.35 Currently only supports ac devices.
INFO:msmart.cli:Sending Device Scan Broadcast...

@ghgeiger or @etienne, do you have any ideas on what may be going wrong here?