@madpilot makes

So, I think I’ve worked out the meaning of the bitstream coming from the outdoor unit!

On my day off, I took the unit of the wall, got me some coffee and setup shop in the hallway, oscilloscope in hand.

I must admit, I’m still getting used to using the oscilloscope and I’m sure there is a far better way to do what I’m trying to do, but I found that if I probe the RX pin on the CPU, with the ‘scope set to single trigger mode and keep hitting the start button, I’d eventually align the waveform at the start of the cycle. After that I used the onscreen rulers to work out the gaps between the pulses. I then wrote them down in to this spreadsheet. I’d change a setting, take a new set of readings, and repeat until I had covered enough states that I could get a complete picture of what was going on.

Looking at the data, I could start to see some patterns.

1. The shortest spacing was around 2ms (some longer; some shorter)
2. The RX pin is idle low, and there is always a high transition to represent the start bit
3. There seems to be a low transition to represent a stop bit
4. There is 9 bits between the start and stop bit (except for the last set)

It’s starting to look like a straight up serial transmission, except the idle state, start and stop bits are inverted, so unfortunately the built in serial protocol decoder wouldn’t read it.

Next I need to find the bits that change between each state.

The power bit was pretty obvious: there was only one bit that was different when the power was off – the 68th bit.

Looking at the rest of that byte, there was a pattern developing in the next 3 bits – they seemed to change when the settings changed. Taking LSB first, Fan only mode is represented by 0x01, Humidity mode (Yeah – I don’t know what that is either) is 0x02, Cool mode is 0x03, Heat mode is 0x04 and Auto mode is 0x05. The next three bits represent the fan speed: Auto 0x00, Speed 2: 0x02, Speed 3: 0x03, Speed 4: 0x04. But was was the ninth bit?

Having a think about serial, it’s could a parity bit. By summing the number of bits, it became pretty obvious it was odd parity. I checked this against the other bytes, and it checked out – now we are getting somewhere!

Looking at the next byte, it was clear it was changing with the temperature. I purposely looked at the lowest possible setting for the temperature (15deg) and the highest (30deg) and it was here I was lead down the garden path a little. Reading up on other people’s efforts at reverse engineering air conditioner units, this is a fairly common range. Many of the IR transmitters represent this as a 4 bit number, where 0x0 is 15 and 0xF 30. Unfortunately, I couldn’t for the life of me work out how that mapped to the numbers I was seeing.

It turns out, this system uses a 5 bit number – feasibly being able to represent 0 – 31 degrees. Bits 6 and 7 are always 0, and bit 8 is the “economy” settings.

There is four unknown bytes, and one block that seems to be make up of 5 bytes. My guess is one of the unknown bytes is reserved for errors, and one is a serial number of some sort. I have no clue what the other two could be for, and I’m quite confused by the last, short byte.

But this is definitely progress!

I did a final check the get some timing on what is transmitted, and there seems to be three windows of roughly 212ms each. The first from the outdoor unit, the second transmitted by the remote control, and I’m guessing the third is for a slave unit.

To build a test harness, I’ll need to bit-bang the data for 212ms, then set the line to high impedance for 424ms. This will hopefully allow me to get the remote control to work on my bench. Once I can get the remote to work, I can analyse what it is doing. Next, I’ll simulate that as well, then set the remote to slave mode and work out that part of the protocol. Once I have the three parts of the protocol nutted out, I can just simulate the outdoor unit, connect the spare remote controller as master, and the microcontroller will become the slave. Easy!

I hacked together a little node-red script that listens for events from my eventsource module that I knocked up, which is generally working pretty well – occasionally, it selects the wrong input, because I’m relying on my CEC hack but I’ll deal with that later.

Time to knock up a quick case.

I did up a quick design in FreeCAD and printed it out. Originally, I based the design off the Apple TV, as I thought I could have some sort of visual symmetry.

It looked terrible.

It was way bigger than it needed to be, and looked cheap and nasty. And once I decided to add CEC, I needed access to the HDMI port, so a redesign was in order.

I came up with a second design (top, bottom, foot), which hugged the contours of the PI. I also dropped the cutout for the IR plexglass, instead making a feature of the LEDs and IR receiver.

After printing it out, I put everything together and placed it next to my receiver. But there was a problem – the network kept dropping out. It turns out that as the temperature rose inside the case, the wifi chip would reset. Boo.

I tried drilling some holes in it, and it didn’t make too much difference. At this point, it was Christmas, so I removed the top of the case and hide it behind the receiver (I didn’t need the IR bit at the moment – the CEC did what I needed).

Fast forward a month, and I decided to revisit. I had just bought a Raspberry PI 3, with an official case for a project at work, and I noticed that it had no air holes, so I wondered if something was wrong with the WIFI dongle. It was sitting at a weird angle over a chip that did get warm, so I unsoldered it, and re-soldered it at a different weird angle, away from the chip.

Of course, I overcooked it.

Luckily, I had a spare, which looks like a more robust unit. I took that one apart, and soldered it in.

I’m sure it’s breaking some sort of USB spec, but it works.

I put it back in the case

and screwed it back together

The case still isn’t perfect. The front left corner needs a screw stalk (The gap is because there is nothing holding it together). I could fix it with some sort of clip, but I’m thinking about a completely different design, which will have LEDs on an angle and on the back, but that would require a new PCB, so I’ll stick with this for the moment. I still can’t work out how to get a less streaky top. I clearly need some more 3D printing practice.

Here is a picture of it in situ:

It’s on an angle, because I bounce the IR off the coffee table. The audio receiver works perfectly, the foxtel works pretty well (though that is more to do with my LIRC setup). The TV doesn’t really work – it’s a bit far away, which is why I want to redesign the case.

It’s good enough for now. I’m going to spend some time on the software.

I took the remote unit off the wall again, and this time removed the signal wire fro the remote and attached it to my Oscilloscope.

And this is signal that comes from the outdoor unit.

I’m not sure if I stuffed up my reading the last time, but it looks like the pulse width is 2ms.

Really, I needed to replay this and see if I could get my test unit to initialise. I thought about using an Ardiuno, so I googled bit banging serial to see the best way to do it. One of the results that caught my eye was another Hackaday article entitled “Introduction to FTDI bitbang mode“. I had literally just cleaned up my workbench and found a FTDI module. Perfect!

I knocked up a little circuit that drove a transistor from 0V to 12V, and adapted the code from the article to control the FTDI modules CTS line. I had to reduce the sleep time to 1.8ms to adjust for kernel context switches (I’m guessing) while talking to the adapter. I got it pretty close to 2ms though.

I wired it up to the controller, and got one step closer – now instead of timing out and flashing C0 12, it just sits flashing “9C” forever.

My guess? This communication protocol works on one-wire – I’m not releasing the line, so the remote never gets a chance to send a response. It looks like I’ll need some sort of tri-state buffer, so I can set the line to high-impedance after I’ve sent the preamble.

I was curious to see if I could get any other clues to the protocol, so I started poking around the big chip on the PCB. One of the pins receives the same signal the signal line does, except it’s inveted and 0-5V! I went and looked up the chip (it’s a UPD78F0393 from NEC – I’m so glad the remote manufacture labelled all their chips nicely), and that pin (#75) is labelled RXD0. That sounds like a serial receive line to me!

Pin 76 is labelled TXD0, which I’m guessing is the transmit line. This should make decoding stuff way easier, because I’ll be able to see what is actually being transmitted and received separately. Win!

I’m going to try and trace out the front-end to this – so far I see a NJM2904 (an op-amp) is on the path – my guess is that is the thing inverting the signal and driving it to 12V. Tracing this circuit out should allow me to build a compatible circuit from my microcontroller.

So my test unit arrived!

I get it on my bench, and test out my theory – if I’m right, it should boot up and start sending commands when the buttons are pressed.

I was wrong.

The unit just sits there flashing “9C” for a couple of minutes, then failing over to a “C0 12” error. The Oscilloscope was no use either – I just saw a constant 12V on the signal wire.

Hmmm.

Looks like I’ll have to pull off the real wall unit.

Using some wire and alligator clips, I extended the wires so I could reach them with the scope.

This time I got somewhere – I could see a signal!

The pulse width is around 1.04ms, going from 12V to 0V. Weird.

I go distracted for a while trying to decode the protocol – is there start bits and stop bits? What about a parity bit?

I knocked together a quick D3 script (I’m a web developer, remember – I use web technology for a lot of this stuff because that is what I’m used to) to display the wave form. First, I wrote a ruby script that created a CSV file of just the transitions. There are two entries for each transition – a 0V and 12V value – so the graph ends up looking like a binary stream.

I then wrote another script that aligned the stream so each pulse was exactly 1.04, and each pulse hight was 12V or 0v. Finally, I scaled everything so the pulse width was 1, as this made reading the graphs easier.

I ended up with some pretty graphs like this:

There was still a problem though – I didn’t have a baseline for the communications.

I knew that the control unit didn’t send any data unless it was connected to the outside unit. I also knew that changing the temperature changed some of the bits in the data stream, so clearly there was some half-duplex serial communication going on. I needed to find out what the outdoor unit sent to initialise the control unit…

I’ve never done any reverse engineering before, but spurred on by this recent Hackaday article, and this article I found I thought I’d give is a crack.

The first issue: I had no idea what the model number was – it’s not written on the unit, nor on the instruction manual. So I just googled for Fujitsu airconditioner remote, hit image results and looked for one that looked the same. Once I found it and clicked through to the source page, I found out that it is a UTB-YUB/GUB/TUB (There are three model numbers depending on where in the world you are).

I found a supplier on ebay (who was actually Melbourne based), who had a new remote unit for $60, which I bought as I wanted a test unit on my workbench – mainly because trying to test things using the unit on the wall would be really annoying.

While I waited for it to arrive, I continued googling to find as much info as I could about it. Thankfully, a number of airconditioning repair places have their installation manuals online. Reading though the them, it was clear there was a three wires that connect the remote to the outdoor unit – +12V, GND and a signal.

Bingo.

Now, I need to work out what this signal wire does.

My first hypothesis was the remote unit worked a lot like an IR remote – every button press sent the complete state to the outdoor unit. If this was the case, it should just be a matter of hooking up a DSO (I have the LabNation SmartScope), copying the signal and replaying it via a microcontroller.

While I could pull the one off the wall, I patiently waited for my test unit to arrive.

I am not the first person to build an IR blaster for a RaspberryPI, and I sure won’t be the last. Thanks to the LIRC gpio module, the circuit required is super simple:

One side is the transmitter – 3 IR LEDs in series, with a 56ohm resistor, driven by a bog-standard BC547 transistor.

The LEDs I used have a 1.2V at 20mA. forward voltage, so the three in series drop 3.6V. R2 needs to drop 1.4V (to add up to 5V). R = V/I, so R2 needs 70 ohm. For some reason, I picked a 56 ohm resistors, so the LEDs will get driven a little harder at 25mA, which is still well with in their spec (They max out at 50mA).

The transmitter side is even easier – the device does all the work, so there is just a pull down resistor on the signal leg. I picked GPIO 17 and 18 at random – any GPIO line will work, and you can configure it in software.

CEC is actually a very simple protocol. Each packet is at least two bytes, the first nibble: an integer between 0 and 16 representing the sender, the second an integer between 0 and 16 representing the receiver, followed by a byte-long opcode. Some opcodes allow additional parameters.

All devices talk in “party line” mode, meaning everyone hears every message (there is a maximum of 16 devices, so routing and partitioning is overkill). It also means every device knows what is going on all the time.

The protocol allows you to find out all sorts of interesting information: is a device turned in? What device is currently active?

You can also ask devices to do stuff: turn up the volume, schedule a recording, or switch inputs.

The problem is: no body seems to implement the spec completely. And many manufacturers don’t do it correctly.

For example: my Yamaha receiver (a RX-V347) supports the user control opcode (0x44) and the change AV input opcode (0x69) which is supposed to take another parameter to denote the input you wish to choose. If the input entered is 0, then the next input is selected. This receiver only accepts 0 as a input code, which makes selecting a specific input (without knowledge of what the current input is) impossible.

There was a fun work around for this though; my RaspberryPI is connected to a HDMI input in my receiver, which I know the number of. By working out the distance each input number is from that input, I can select the RaspberryPi as the active input then send a change AV input a number of times until the right one is selected. Do it fast enough and no one would notice.

Why don’t I just interrogate the amp and ask it what input is currently selected? I could, but there is only facilities to find out what HDMI input is active. If the AV1 input is active (which has my Sonos attached) I’m out of luck.

Of course, none of this stuff is documented any where so there is a lot of trial and error going on to work out what opcodes each device handles, and whether they handle it correctly.

I had a couple of the original Raspberry PIs on my desk, and since they were just sitting gathering dust they seemed like the perfect candidate for this project.

I don’t know why, by the composite port really irks me. I’m never going to use it, and it really juts out, and realistically this was going to be WiFi only, so I could get rid of the network port. Also, plugging in a Wifi adapter made the board unnecessarily long.

Time to trim it down a bit.

First, I removed the composite port by clipping the leads and desoldering the remains.

Then I removed the network plug. The two holes that held it in will come in handy later…

Finally, I removed the USB sockets.

Much neater! And regular shaped. Of course, there is now no way to interface with it. I took a perfectly good USB WiFi module and gutted that.

And then direct soldered it to the PI.

Now I have a minimalist WiFi-enabled RaspberryPI! If I need to make any changes, I just ssh in and do it via command line. If I really need a keyboard, I’ll just put the SD card in another PI that is more fully featured, and do it there.

Next up: the IR blaster board

Full disclosure: I started this project a while ago – according to the photo app on my phone, almost 12 months ago! I originally wanted to build it so I could control my TV, Yamaha receiver, Foxtel set-top box and Apple TV from my phone and watch. I like to listen to music while I cook, but changing the song, or the volume is a pain – I have to stop, wash and dry my hands, then walk over to find the remote.

The project got shelved for a while (Oooh! shiny things!), as I worked on my garage door project, but then I had an excuse to resurrect it.

My wife casually mentioned that she wanted to be able to stream music, and listen to the radio at the back of the house. And even in the front room, she found turning on the Apple TV to stream Spotify annoying. She also hated having to turn on the TV just to play.

There was only one solution I could see: Purchase a Sonos!

I actually purchased two: A Sonos Play:1, that we can move around the house as we need it – it usually lives in the bedroom, but we can easily take it outside when we have people over; and a Sonos CONNECT – I already have a perfectly good receiver and speaker setup, replacing all of it sounded like over kill.

Now we could stream music around the house easily without it stopping if the phone rang, and without draining our phone batteries. There was still a small issue though: the Play:1 turns on as soon as your press play on the phone app, as does the CONNECT. Unfortunately, my receiver didn’t.

Time to dust off the IR blaster.

The CONNECT publishes uPNP data, which homeassistant.io already listens to. This in turn fires an event when ever the devices starts playing music, which I consume using node-red, which makes an API call to another node app I have running on a Raspberry PI, which in turn blasts out some IR via LIRC.

Simple really :)

I’ll write up the different parts over the next couple of weeks.