Native support for Gree Air Conditioner
As all Gree Air Conditioner Units come with Wi-Fi it would be great to have a native support in the Tado Hub without the need of an extra Smart AC Control.
In my case I have all Smart Radiator Thermostat on each radiator and Wireless Temperature Sensor in each room. I like that both of those require no connection to the power socket and run on battery. When putting air conditioner I would have to either replace the current Temperature sensor with the the AC Sensor or have them both + Radiator Sensor which makes no sense.
Gree air conditioner comes with built-in Wi-Fi and it has an REST API. Specification for the API is not public but I'm sure that if you would work with Gree on bringing support they would give you the access to the technical documentation. If not there have already been reverse engineering done on the REST API:
https://github.com/tomikaa87/gree-remote
https://github.com/alexmuntean/gree-airconditioner-rest
As hub is connected to the network it could make REST API calls to the Gree Air Conditioner without any need for an additional AC module.
Comments
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There are a number of brands of AC with WiFi either as standard or an option e.g. Daikin. All of them are proprietary and at best only support their own matching apps. If Tado are able to do this then clearly support for multiple brands would be useful.
Whilst Tado would lose the revenue of the sale of a Tado Smart AC Controller from a technical and customer point of view I would agree being able to control an AC unit via WiFi would be better as it likely would provide greater levels of control and also likely solve the issue of an IR remote changing settings and Tado not detecting this since via a WiFi conversation it could poll the AC unit for such setting changes.
It maybe that in order for Tado to gain revenue to make this worthwhile to them - which is only fair a software only purchase for this feature would be an option. After all Tado do sell software only features already.
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