De-smarting the Reef Factory roller mats?

[afboundguy]

Has anyone ever "de-smartified" the Reef Factory smart roller mats? Seems like it wouldn't be too bad and curious if it could alleviate all the potential future issues with the company and the bankruptcy issues?

Seems like one could get the power wires and have the roller only be on/off when triggered by the float switch through a controller...

 

[The Blunt Oracle]

I am not entirely familiar with the internals but from other solutions I have seen it shouldn't be too hard looking at the design to replace the functionality as at the core of it its just a controlled motor to run the roll and is triggered by a float switch by the look of it.

It would be a pretty easy to do up an ESP32 to do this and offer the same "smart" functionality for usage prediction and stopping it rolling the entire thing is the float switch gets stuck.

If the ESP is a bit too daunting you could look at using a Tuya style wifi controlled relay with switch inputs and just use the Tuya app to do the automation and alerting.

 

[afboundguy]

I am not entirely familiar with the internals but from other solutions I have seen it shouldn't be too hard looking at the design to replace the functionality as at the core of it its just a controlled motor to run the roll and is triggered by a float switch by the look of it.

It would be a pretty easy to do up an ESP32 to do this and offer the same "smart" functionality for usage prediction and stopping it rolling the entire thing is the float switch gets stuck.

If the ESP is a bit too daunting you could look at using a Tuya style wifi controlled relay with switch inputs and just use the Tuya app to do the automation and alerting.

That is sort of what I was thinking. I actually would consider using a relay timer like this (https://a.co/d/07XD5YN2) instead of the ESP chip to give it a specific time off so it only runs for a set amount of time or program it to do the same thing on my Hydros with a max run time.

 

[The Blunt Oracle]

That is sort of what I was thinking. I actually would consider using a relay timer like this (https://a.co/d/07XD5YN2) instead of the ESP chip to give it a specific time off so it only runs for a set amount of time or program it to do the same thing on my Hydros with a max run time.

Either way that should work by the look of it. The only thing you'd be missing out on is alerting of issues and the roll remaining / warning tracking but that is not really a huge issue at the end of the day.

Its kind of sad that manufacturers are pushing out "smart" devices with zero way to interface with most of the functionality locally if the company goes under and the underlying cloud or server infrastructure is no longer available or they decide to just stop supporting that device.

 

[afboundguy]

Either way that should work by the look of it. The only thing you'd be missing out on is alerting of issues and the roll remaining / warning tracking but that is not really a huge issue at the end of the day.

Its kind of sad that manufacturers are pushing out "smart" devices with zero way to interface with most of the functionality locally if the company goes under and the underlying cloud or server infrastructure is no longer available or they decide to just stop supporting that device.

I could care less about the tracking for how much roll is less. I'm super annoyed that it keeps saying it's blocked with absolutely nothing in the way or it actually being blocked. Every time I hit the button manually it spins freely and every time I restart it on the app it works fine.