Mattia's Blog

This is part 2 of a series of posts where I'll try to show how I am trying to set up a home control and monitoring system using open source tools and network enabled sensors. In  Part 1  I illustrated how I decoded my Toshiba Air Conditioner AC signal, in this part I'll build on that to show how I built and ESP8266 based unit that is able to control five separate AC units in (hopefully in the near future) different rooms by receiving commands from a central server. The ESP8266 unit has also five DS18B20 temperature sensors that will be used to monitor real temperatures in the different rooms Parts List: one ESP8266 based dev board, powered from USB, it has seven output pins available to control various sensors/modules, wifi capabilities and the NodeMcu firmware that allows normal arduino sketches to run on it 5  SendIR module : an arduino/esp8266 controllable module that has two high power/high range IR emitters, used to control AC units in different ro

Introduction I am in the process of installing some Toshiba air conditioners in my house, and am planning to control them remotely using OpenHab (http://www.openhab.org/). The first step to be able to control the air conditioner is to be able to emulate IR signals as they are sent by the AC remote. In order to do that I have modified an open source IR library (https://github.com/r45635/HVAC-IR-Control) to add support for the Toshiba AC units. Air Conditioning remotes work in a slightly different way than standard remotes as they usually transmit a packet containing all information related to the AC as opposed to, say, TV remotes where every keypress transmits only a single information like a button press. This is a typical packet sent from a Toshiba Remote (in Hexadecimal): # Key Hex      # Bits 1 fan1 F2   0D   03   FC   01   00   40   00   41   F2   0D   03   FC   01   00   40   00   41      144 it is a 72 bit packet that is transmitted twice (I imagine