Hector Martin

I was going to write a @home_assistant integration for my aircon. Then I found that project, and figured maybe I didn't have to. Still going to do it.

I just... don't understand how multiple people contributing to a project end up (manually!) capturing thousands of IR codes from remotes to make this work and don't stop and think that there might be a better way.

I'm interested ... is it possible in simple words to explain how it could be done? Isn't it necessary to try the keys one by one anyway?

Aircon remotes don't send keycodes, they have a screen and keep track of the current settings on the remote, then transfer the entire state to the aircon. The right way to do this is to reverse engineer the packet format and figure out where mode, temp, fan speed, etc go.

These people are literally spending hours with each remote trying every possible speed setting times every possible temperature times every possible mode (and missing out on any additional features because some have so many combinations it would take weeks to capture them all).

Right ... I read something somewhere ... As there are millions (billions?) of combinations they preferred to choose the most common commands ...

Depends on the aircon, but if you include all the features of the one I have in front of me, that's 5 modes × 4 fan speeds × 13 temperatures × 3 submodes × 11 sleep timer settings × ~144 on timer countdowns = 1235520 possible packets, give or take (some are not valid)