Thanks to https://github.com/omerfaruk-aran/esphome_samsung_hvac_bus project, I now have my older living room aircon unit hooked up to Home Assistant!

I used a Seeed Studio Xiao ESP32-C3 board, with a 3.3V capable fully isolated RS485 converter board that I had lying around.
Seeed also has its own RS485 Xiao breakout which would be perfect. In fact, I ordered one of those, but I forgot to wait for it to arrive! Heh.

The small black cube that has a JST connector is a miniature 240VAC to 5V 0.5A converter (HiLink HLK-PM01). I ordered several of these from a reputable supplier a while ago. They’re helpful when monitoring/controlling a device with no convenient DC supply to siphon off. (Note to self — pull this out and add a fuse inline tomorrow).

#Tinkering #s0Projects

Thanks to https://github.com/omerfaruk-aran/esphome_samsung_hvac_bus project, I now have my older living room aircon unit hooked up to Home Assistant!

I used a Seeed Studio Xiao ESP32-C3 board, with a 3.3V capable fully isolated RS485 converter board that I had lying around.
Seeed also has its own RS485 Xiao breakout which would be perfect. In fact, I ordered one of those, but I forgot to wait for it to arrive! Heh.

The small black cube that has a JST connector is a miniature 240VAC to 5V 0.5A converter (HiLink HLK-PM01). I ordered several of these from a reputable supplier a while ago. They’re helpful when monitoring/controlling a device with no convenient DC supply to siphon off. (Note to self — pull this out and add a fuse inline tomorrow).

#Tinkering #s0Projects

3/
I then went and opened up the other unit, and pulled out the input board. Under all the dust, a few things became apparent.
First, they revised the design to remove the stupid metal tab that you had to bend to be able to remove the input board without taking every other board out first. Nice.
Second, the only noticeable revision to the input board was replacing those exact yellow capacitors with a different kind of film/poly cap. Aha! Vindication perhaps?

Anyway, I was able to swap the newer input board into the older amp (after removing all the dust).
And then test, and yay! It worked great!
Nice quiet fans achieving plenty of airflow, chassis doesn’t get hot, no input popping. This 20-year old amp is ready for another decade or two of service, I hope.
And maybe I’ll get some filter foam over the front intake…

#tinkering #s0Projects

I wrote a quick blog post about my Soldering Fume Extractor v4 finally.

It's a relatively cheap (~AU$120), compact, effective and quiet fume extractor, that uses cheap off-the-shelf filters.

Anyone who's interested in making one, check it out. If there's more interest I'll see about building a v4.5 with stronger 7mm ply.

https://blog.s0.is/blog/soldering-fume-extractor-v4

#tinkering#s0Projects

I wrote a quick blog post about my Soldering Fume Extractor v4 finally.

It's a relatively cheap (~AU$120), compact, effective and quiet fume extractor, that uses cheap off-the-shelf filters.

Anyone who's interested in making one, check it out. If there's more interest I'll see about building a v4.5 with stronger 7mm ply.

https://blog.s0.is/blog/soldering-fume-extractor-v4

#tinkering#s0Projects

fuck yeah, just made a huge breakthrough in reverse-engineering this 20-year-old software implementing an undocumented protocol by Yamaha for remote head-amp gain control, without having one of the other end devices to test with!
#Tinkering#s0Projects