HVAC control in Home Assistant, finally!

Really happy and excited to announce that we are finally getting HVAC within Home Assistant natively

Doug Rathbone has been really busy working on this, and Thermostats are now showing up in HA natively, without any converting code required in the PAC or anything. It just works.

It's read only for now, but if you want to check it out then install his Cgateweb-HomeAssistant fork from here:

https://github.com/dougrathbone/cgateweb-homeassistant

Screenshots attached.

Many of you on here will probably have seen that I have been posting about this topic for the last year, trying various ways to make it work, so I'm really over the moon with this

Thanks Doug !

 

I tried installing this on my DEV system as 'managed cgate' and uploaded my DB file. When I start the App it all looks Ok until it tries to discover my network and I get the below. Is there something I missed in the documentation? Have you encountered this before?

INFO [MqttManager] Bridge readiness changed: Online (all-connected)
DEBUG [bridge] C-Gate Recv (Cmd): 401 Bad object or device ID.
INFO [BridgeInitializationService] Network auto-discovery: C-Gate 401 Bad object or device ID.; using configured networks
INFO [BridgeInitializationService] Network auto-discovery returned no networks; falling back to configured values

 

Hi. I haven't seen that, I have my own C-gate server running so I've never used it in managed mode before. 401 is usually an authentication error though, so I'd start there.

 

401 isn't an HTTP error, it's a Cgate error. It means the item you are asking about doesn't exist. Since it's finding no networks, nothing is going to exist. Are you sure Cgate is connected to the network and working properly. Does Toolkit connect to Cgate and scan the network?

 

Hi Ashley. To enable remote control of the thermostat from HA, we need to capture what commands are being sent to it from a Touchscreen or Wiser etc. I don't have either of those. Can PICED emulate a touchscreen or Wiser? How would you go about it?

 

I am using the App's internal "Managed" mode for CGate so there is no external access to it. I don't want to fire up a separate external CGate instance and wanted to test the application as-is with everything contained. From the documentation it should just work but it doesn't seem to be the case.

 

It's still running Cgate, just starting it for you on the local machine. If you just copied the DB file across from another machine it may have incorrect interface information. Connect to it via Telnet on port 20023 and you can see whats going on. The Cgate help file will show you the commands.

 

The touch screen or wiser don't use Cgate, they communicate directly with cbus using the HVAC protocol. This is not trivial to impement. I know this as I've done it. Cgateweb-HomeAssistant uses Cgate. The Cgate help file will give you all you need. If you really want to know what the touch screen or wiser is sending, run the diagnostic utility and filter on the $AC application.

 

If you're really that keen, here's the HVAC protocol

 

Should have mentioned if you want to control the thermostat set point from Cgate use the "aircon set_zone_hvac_mode" command.

And the documentation says to send the temperature in degrees C, but that is wrong. You have to send it in 1/256 of a degree (i.e. multiply the temperature by 256). This is what the raw protocol needs and whoever did the Cgate code forgot the conversion. I guess the command was never used as the thermostats and hence the HVAC app died when Schneider took over.

 

Thanks Ashley, I noticed the app has had an update overnight, and now HVAC control from within HA is fully working! Not sure how he's done it, the man is a genius