Having a pump in a distant location the place you aren’t continually monitoring it’s a frequent state of affairs, which could be unlucky when stated pump runs into issues like a dry nicely, jammed impeller or energy points. That is the place pump displays just like the older SymCom (now Littelfuse) PumpSaver Plus 233P will defend the pump if such circumstances are detected. In fact, the infrared communication port on it makes use of an undocumented protocol that was meant for use with a long-since discontinued handheld machine. Ergo [Elizabeth Camporeale] noticed match to reverse-engineer this protocol.
Within the set up guide for this machine this Informer unit is briefly talked about together with the knowledge it would show on its display, making it clear that it’s fairly actually simply there to behave as a show for the knowledge that’s continually generated on this interface. Naturally, that is extremely helpful when you want to tie the system right into a wider monitoring and automation system.
Considerably uncommon, this IR interface on the used 233P-1.5 unit turned out to be use a 5,000 baud NRZ, MSB-first protocol, with the juicy particulars totally documented and a Python-based decoder implementation supplied.
Naturally [Elizabeth] didn’t simply reverse-engineer this for the enjoyable of it, but additionally for ESPHome integration. This makes use of a setup as could be seen within the high picture, with an ESP32-C6 module offering the processing energy and Wi-Fi, with a normal phototransistor recording the info pumped out by the pump monitor.
