4 new devices this weekend got a DHCP IP from my servers. Some of them were wins, some not.
First, the ugly. I have a Rheem hot water heater. So obviously I purchased the wifi adapter for it. After about 3-4 hours of guessing and decompiling apk's, more guessing, tcpdumps, I have basically nothing.
What do I know? The device runs Marvel-WM. I portscanned it and found only 1 open port. 80. Connecting to that port and requesting various things, results in basically nothing useful. if you request /sys from it, you get a dump of your network settings. There is also a /lm/alerts that will dump alerts, but I don't have any, so it was empty. The device only talks via https to some amazon aws instance, so nothing to snoop. Total dead end. I give it an F.
Now the good. Opengarage.io. Install was simple. Device was an ESP8266 at it's heart. Gives a little web page for control, lets me do whatever I want, homeassistant has an integration. Done and done.
Finally, I got an EcoWitt HP3501 Weather Station.
This thing is beautiful. It has all the bells and whistles, additional sensors are on Amazon, and cheap. Again, ESP based, not sure what version though. Easy to setup, the range on the sensors is incredible. Builtin to the device, once you install the phone-app, is the ability to push updates to any IP/port. It does so by connecting via http, and sending a POST request full of simple data. Within a few hours I was able to whip up both a python library, and a home assistant integration.
So at the end of the day, yes, buy both of these. The weather station is cheap, well made, and open enough that I don't care. The Opengarage is one of those instant wins, so it's almost a no-brainer. Super happy with the weather station though.
And then... I also bought my wife a WiFi Instant Pot. That one is proving more difficult.. I expect failure, but will report more later.
