Automating the Brink Flair

Ok, short one, but I spent the last day re-living my electrical engineer days and wanted to share in the hope I help others who were navigating the somewhat hard to find / read docs from Brink. It amazes me that in 2020 a device that costs €2–€3k doesn’t come with a ZigBee or Z-Wave module out of the box.

My aim was to be able to fully control the HRU (heat recovery unit - for ventilation but in a way that ensures the air coming into the house is warmed by the air leaving, and so saving heating bills) from Home Assistant.

I have published it all on node-red: https://flows.nodered.org/flow/4e93b2dc8ff6acb5dbbcd48b1df92224

This is the setup I am using to publish events for my Brink Flair 300 heat recovery unit. I have a Raspberry Pi 3, with an RS485>USB, connected to the 2 & 3 pin of the X15 input of the HRU. The flow in Node-Red talks locally to the device via modbus, and then connects to an mqtt server that is used for further connection to Home Assistant, this appears to be the most robust solution.

I used this USB stick: Rpi RS485 USB, but I think any of them will work. You do not need to buy the super expensive ‘digital adapter’ and the app, and with this setup you also do not need the super expensive RF bridge and connectors (though will likely want some physical alternative to this setup to turn it on / off if needed).

It currently provides temperature, set fan speed, actual fan speed, binary sensors for max, medium, normal (same as the 4-way RF switch) and inputs for speed (50–300, +50, -50). I also have another flow connecting this to the output of my air sensor, so when the air quality drops or it detects us cooking it turns the ventilation on!

Huge thanks to https://github.com/sirjackal/brink-modbus as this was essential in making it all work and getting the steer towards Modbus being the way to connect.

The gist below has all of the files referred to in this article: https://gist.github.com/cliftonc/4e93b2dc8ff6acb5dbbcd48b1df92224

Connection to Brink Flair

Use the 2 & 3 connections to the red X15 (note that mine came with a removable red plug already in it - so I just needed to connect it).

To verify it was working, I translated and used the python script from the https://github.com/sirjackal/brink-modbus repository, along with mbpoll.

Amazingly (after reversing the wires as I got it wrong first time around!) it actually worked :)

Then it was a matter of getting it all in node-red, then wiring up to home assistant via mqtt.

Then finally going into Home Assistant itself and creating the sensors (the actual configuration.yaml is in the gist above):

And then last of all the dashboards:

It lives!