Coaxing a manufacturer unsupported reverse cycle air conditioner back into being a smart device

After the pandemic, we decided to upgrade to a larger house. I sold the old one, and we moved into a nicer, larger house. Whilst I've since done some upgrades to the new house, it still has the two reverse cycle air conditioners that it came with.

These are Samsung "The Triangle"  AR09FSSSCWKN and AR24FSSSCWKN units.

Inititally when I moved into the house, I contacted Samsung about how to connect them to the wifi.. and got sent around in circles. Try their SmartThings app. Try the old app. The old app just would not work...

Leaving gas behind, and monitoring my home energy usage with Home Assistant

So earlier this year, I took the all-electric jump given the dubious nature of the East coast gas market, and what the air quality monitor we had near our kitchen showed every time we fired up the gas cooktop.

• Upped solar from ~7kW to ~17kW
• Replaced Fronius Primo grid tied inverter with Sigenergy hybrid
  (... anyone want an old Fronius Primo? ... it's sitting on floor of my garage)
• Added Sigenergy ~32kWh battery)
• Added Sigenergy whole home gateway
• Replaced central gas heating with additional RCACs (Reverse Cycle Air Conditioners)
• Replaced gas cooktop with Westinghouse induction (20A model, boost on a single zone at a time, needed stonemason with full PPE to work with manufactured stone counter top; already had a separate electric oven)
• Replaced gas instant HWS (Hot Water Service; was a failed gas boosted solar, where solar loop had failed) with Aqua Pro heat pump HWS
• Decommissioned the gas connection to our house (retailer arranged for distributor to come out to house, remove the meter, and disconnect the line at the street) 

Home Assistant and Tuya - which path did I choose?

Tuya licenses an IoT platform that is VERY popular with the OEMs of various IoT products. If you buy something from a big box IoT store, ALDI, etc., chances are in a lot of cases, it's going to be powered by Tuya technology.

Initially they used chips from Espressif, and these were easily reflashed to other firmwares, but more recently they have moved to using different SoCs which either require physical connection to re-flash OR cannot be reflashed and need to be replaced if you wish to use different firmware.

Tuya does provide a cloud integration for Home Assistant, "Tuya", but it is a cloud integration, which means that to control your local devices, you need to reach out to the Tuya cloud and back to control things.

I don't know about you, but the idea of needing to reach out to the cloud and back to be able to turn something on and off seems counter intuitive. Additionally, the official Tuya cloud integration only supports some devices. So once you connect it to your Tuya account, you might find some devices are seen, but HA cannot provide any control of the device. Work is being undertaken over time for the cloud integration to have broader device support, but it's slow going.

Firewall upgrade

After noting that my long serving Asus RT-AC5300 running Merlin AsusWRT had gone EoL (and had long since had its WiFi duties taken over by two UniFi WiFi 6 Lites), I decided to dip my toe into perhaps a more advanced setup, and set about configuring a small mini-server to host a containerisation and virtualisation solution for my networking needs. It's working, but it's also still a work in progress.

Getting Matter going on an SLZB-MR4 with Home Assistant

After going backwards and forwards on different home automation radio options, I eventually settled on an SMLight SLZB-MR4 Zigbee / Thread / PoE Ethernet / USB adapter.

I chose the SLZB-MR4 because my Home Assistant server is all the way in one corner of my house, and I wanted the option to centrally place the radios, and that doing that with power supplied over ethernet made it really easy to put it wherever the nearest RJ45 was.

Trying to install HACS on HomeAssistant OS 2026 / v17 I got sent around in loops until...

I have Home Assistant - and at the time of trying to initially install HACS I had:

Installation method Home Assistant OS
Core 2026.2.2
Supervisor 2026.02.1
Operating System 17.1
Frontend 20260128.6

I'd been trying to install HACS for ages. When clicking web buttons to install it into my HAOS instance, it would redirect from the HACS site, to my Home Assistant instance, but continually say it couldn't find the app.

Lots of web matches said you could run the get.hacs.xyz script through shell, but didn't recommend it for OS version of HA.

I noticed the repository in the HACS site in the URL being passed to my HA instance was:  

https://github.com/hacs/addons

... so I went to my HA settings, went to Apps, went to Install App, went to the meatball menu in the top right, selected Repositories, and then added the above URL.

I then went back to the HACS website, used the add link, and it found the app!

 

Google Workspace Calendar sucks for editing recurring events!

 GAAAAAAH!

Email from my domain registrar, Rebel, saying the registrar of record's going to change?

Out of the blue, I got an email from one of my current domain name registrars. It seems they're offloading their .au domain name registration business to another business (been through this before, at least this time I'm being told in advance). The email correctly listed all the .au domains I hold with them, but had no web link to an FAQ, or to the receiving registrar.

UPDATE: Rebel published an FAQ.

UPDATE: Seems Rebel borked at least the technical contacts in the transfer from themselves as registrar, to Domain Directors as registrar and them as reseller.

NBN Speeds - what about upload?

So, when the NBN was introduced to Australia, each of the tiers was generally named after the maximum theoretical speed you might get in a "perfect world" scenario... but then marketing got a hold of things...

How I do backups: rsync is my friend :)

There are many many fancy backup programs out there, that have all sorts of cool features. I remember, a long time ago, using ntbackup (which saved my bacon and that of the business I worked for at the time), and later Backup Exec. Of course, now, there's cloud cloud cloud all over the place.. What if, however, you just want to backup from one place to another without a subscription fee?

Well, it took awhile, and the script's evolved over time, but I presently use rsync for backups. In conjunction with a filesystem that supports hard links, I can store date stamped copies of a given source, where the backup disk only stores changed files between copies, saving disk space - but all the files are ready for direct access within their respective directory heirarchies.

Your mileage may vary, you may indeed find fancier scripts, but this one works for me :)

Well that sucks: 3D printing a mounting bracket to stow a third party turbo head on a Miele S2130 vacuum

So, my mum's got the Thermomix bug. So much so, she's even bought the German mob's vacuum cleaner. Her old Dyson has been relegated to the shed where Dad uses it around his workbench, and I picked up her old Miele.

Now, at some point, she'd gotten a third party turbo head for the Miele. The first one didn't work so well, but the second one does. It's a bit noisy, but functional. That said, because it's a third party head, it doesn't have the usual hook the Miele heads have. This means that when you are inbetween vacuuming things, you can't stand the wand up in the back of the vacuum, and instead have to rest it up against the wall, or drop it on the floor.

Having recently bought the Aldi Cocoon Create Model Maker, and only printed little models and puzzles to date, I had an idea about something practical. What if I could design a hook that would strap to the third party turbo head, allowing it to hook into the back of the vacuum?

Speaking GCode directly to your 3D printer in Linux when it requires a custom baud rate

I recently impulse bought a 3D printer from Aldi. The Cocoon Create Model Maker HE170707. It's a rebrand of the Wanhao Duplicator i3 Mini. I'm slowly learning how to use it, and how to interact with it.

To date, I've been slicing in Cura and then exporting to SD card, then loading that into the printer, but today I started playing around with sending GCode directly to the printer. Eventually I want to update the version of Marlin it's running, but before I do that, I want to see what settings/version etc. the printer is running.

Cura can see the printer, and can send it basic requests - but it won't show me the printer's responses to particular GCodes, which I want to see. The inbuilt USB to serial adapter the printer uses is locked at 250,000 baud and this isn't supported by minicom.

I did some Googling, and in the end, I found out that I could instead use picocom. It's a very simple, cut down serial terminal package.

WARNING: Don't send commands to your printer if you don't know what they do. Read the instructions first. You change things at your own risk!

Who's that knocking? SSH connection attempts...

I have a dedicated server overseas that I use for hosting various things. It's handy to have something that lives in a remote data centre, separate from all the local goings on. It is, however, as a LAMP stack server, out there on the internet, and folks do "knock on the door" frequently.

I've disabled passworded logins, changed the default SSH port (I know in and of itself, it's not a solution, but it does reduce a lot of the brain dead noise) and firewalled off all but the services which must be accessible externally for the server to function.

I still get hits to the OpenSSH server.

Setting up Linux to automatically launch a browser in a "kiosk" session

At work, we have some monitoring systems which we like to display on separate screens. These screens are connected to old computers which have been reinstalled with Windows. We have them set to auto-launch the displays, but it took some fiddling to get the chrome windows launched and positioned correctly. These instructions use xorg - I'm still not sure on Wayland... will be great when they figure out quick solution for "remote desktop".

Bringing it all together..

Backups: My "uh oh" moment and what I do now for prevention and recovery

End users generally think, "I've saved the document, I'm all good". They put it into the computer and it'll always be there, ready for when they need it.

My "uh oh" wake up moment with regards to data integrity and backups was a long time ago now. It all started with an Athlon 1.4 system I built for myself. I also built a similarly equipped unit for my parents. Both from parts I purchased at a computer "swap meet" (very rarely these days involving any actual swapping). They both consisted of an MSI motherboard, the AMD CPU, RAM, Sony CD Burner, an ASmart Nvidia based AGP4x card, Creative SoundBlaster Live (which would later fail and make everything sound like cartoon chipmunks), a cheap PSU that came with the case ("Hairong"??), Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional and an IBM hard disk - a 40GB DeskDeathstar (I can sense some of you out there groaning now).

Previously to this, I'd used several machines with several types of hard disk (Maxtor, Seagate, WD, Fujitsu etc.) and never had a problem. I hadn't yet suffered a drive failure and so never really considered it would be a problem.

Well, I copped the Deathstar curse.. bad!

Why integrated smarts in televisions isn't always that good.

Device manufacturers love to add bells and whistles to things to try and stand out from the pack. Promoting the idea that you can do it all with their device and do away with the other stuff you'd usually connect in.. but how does this fare over the long term? I don't think "smart" appliances are necessarily that smart.

Online advertising.. The continuing cat and mouse game..

The online advertising industry needs to tackle security, and tackle it fast!

Adding an IP alias to OVH dedicated server

So, as you may have guessed, recently I've moved hosting from a dedicated server at Lunarpages, to a dedicated server at OVH. Lunarpages kept the system I was on going reliably for years (indeed, I'm slowly still migrating services from it), but just couldn't match what I got included by OVH.

Anyway, to keep some things separate, I like to use separate public IPs for them. In the past, you'd just add a stanza to /etc/network/interfaces, and your work was done... but I opted for Ubuntu Server 17.10, and well - it does things differently!

Adding a public SSH key to OVH control panel

A quick post this one.

You bring up your SSH key, you go to paste it into the OVH hosting interface, and then it refuses to show you the button to submit, what gives?

Trying to identify a cheap security DVR's real manufacturer

So, someone I know has a cheap security DVR from Aldi. Distributed by "WinPlus Australia", it's been designated the brand and model "Cocoon Digital Video Security System IT115008".

With the latest hype around the Mirai botnet commandering things exactly like such a security DVR, I decided to get in touch with the local distributor and ask them if any issues had been reported, advisories released, or updates made available.