Hi openHAB friends trying to cool down or heat up your home,
upfront thanks to all people that have been investigating on how to get theses devices controlled and integrated, without them this would not have been possible.
I’ve been following various approaches to control MHI AC Devices on projects flying around on Github and elsewhere.
Most of them did not get beyond read-access, some struggle with device discovery, registration,…you name it.
Not willing to open up the hardware, solder stuff or anything that may void warranty a pure software solution was my target.
So I thought “Why not put all the existing stuff together, use a clever AI and vibe-code something?”
Being capable of coding professionally since years I though this was a good task to validate how far you get these days by just using indent-based development / vibe coding without touching a single line of code or even looking at the code created. Spolier: Quite far, I was seriously impressed what AI (I used Perplexity Pro for the final output, but started with Cline earlier, just for fun and out of curiosity) can achieve if you know how to guide it properly, spend time and simply put some money into the slot machine.
The first result (after many iterations) of this PoC is an mqtt bridge for MHI devices with built-in WF-RAC modules (standard these days) that
- supports read & write actions,
- autodiscovery of devices on the network,
- homeassistant discovery on the mqtt side, supports openHAB (working Things & Channels)
- has docker support
Got four AC units here, and the bridge named “mqtt4mhi” is running in a docker container on a PI5.
Not fully tested on all channels, fixes may come later, but you can check out the solution on your own.
Public Repo is available her:
As said before: Not perfect, just good enough for me as as PoC, nothing more, nothing less.
But worth sharing to give something back to the community.
Consider it was done by using AI as a tool (I might have coded things differently as well as you would have), so it likely contains errors and not completely cleaned-up code. No warranty.
I’m lacking the time to fully support this so do not expect regular updates.
Feel free to use it, fork it, do whatever fits to MIT license, I obviously do not claim ownership not responsibility for anything. Hopefully all sources and reference are covers and I did not forget anybody.
Cool Greetings,
Thomas