Haier, the air conditioner maker, takes down open source third-party Home Assistant integration
Thankfully I don't use any of their products, but this really pisses me off. They claim that this open source project "causes significant economic harm to their company"
This is ridiculous. It is truly ridiculous. How can something that enables the user to efficiently control their AC cause "significant economic harm"???
Consider forking the repository or mirroring it to another platform like GitLab, Codeberg or your self-hosted Git server, so the project can continue to exist and someone can maybe fork it and maintain it.
If you don't know about Home Assistant, check it out. It's an amazing piece of open-source software, that you can run at home on your own server and use it to control your smart home devices. That way, you don't need to connect them to the manufacturer's (probably insecure) cloud. It gives you sovereignty over your smart home instead of some proprietary vendor-locked garbage. Check out their website and the Lemmy community: !homeassistant@lemmy.world
He makes awesome videos in general, consider subscribing.
As Rossmann said, don't ever buy anything from such a shitty company that doesn't respect their customers. This move by Haier is nothing other than a slap in the face for everyone, who just wants to comfortably control the product they paid for. This company is actively hostile towards their paying customers. Fuck these bastards!
Get a ratgdo. It's a little ESP8266-powered board that connects to the garage door opener and lets you open/close it and turn the light on and off, and reports the status of the door (opening, open, closing, closed) and obstruction sensor status via MQTT, entirely locally. I installed one on my LiftMaster garage door opener (an old version with no smart features) and it works well! I zip tied mine inside the plastic cover that goes over the light bulb, as per the developer's recommendation.
They have a beta firmware for HomeKit integration too, to directly control it from Apple devices if you don't want to run something like Home Assistant with an MQTT broker.
"ratgdo" stands for "rage against the garage door opener" :D
The issue is that Chamberlain/LiftMaster garage door openers made in the last 15ish years use an encrypted communication protocol over the wire, so a basic relay won't work.
There's a project called rat-ratgdo where the ratgdo has been reverse engineered and an open-source schematic has been produced. You can make your own based on that and use the ESPHome firmware for the ratgdo. For me it was just easier to buy the ratgdo.
I ripped mine out as soon as they pulled this. Fuck them, they won’t get my data if they won’t let me do what I want with a product I already paid for.