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A project log for Let me control you: Hitachi air conditioner

An attempt to wirelessly control an old Hitachi air conditioner

florianFlorian 06/13/2020 at 01:300 Comments

Before I realized it already a month has passed since my last log so here is a little update.

Because my old and trusty laptop is undergoing a huge transformation to become a dedicated compact desktop computer for my hobby, all I had on hand to use with my cheap logic analyzer is my useless  Nexus 7 tablet. Since there is an Android version of PulseView available I decided to give it a go. After 2 long weeks of flashing various ROM and trying all the USB cables I had I couln'd manage to have PulseView detect my logic analyzer... Until I realized all my USB cables were not OTG type and that I had an extension USB cable laying around long enough to connect my logic analyzer in the living room to my computer in the next room. 

It strikes me how stupid I can be sometimes.

After this miserable failure, I hooked up everything and captured what was going on between the air conditioner and the RAC adapter with no controller connected and adjusting the settings via the remote control.

Results are:
 - the RAC adapter sends the same message composed of 9 packets, each packet starting with "MT" and ending with 0D (hex). The time between each packet is about 48ms and the same message is sent every 4376ms. The packet structure is "MT P=xxxx C=yyyy[0D]".
 - the air conditioner responds to each packet sent after roughtly 12ms. Each response packet starts with "OK" and ends with the same 0D (hex). The packet structure is "OK P=xxxx C=yyyy[0D]" or "OK P=xx C=yyyy[0D]".

You can check the files "Analysis (2020_06_06).xlsx" and "No controller_OFF.sr" for more details.

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