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Zehnder ComfoSpot 50 Communication Protocol

March 28, 2021 Electronics, Passive House 5 Comments

This is an attempt at reverse engineering the communication protocol used by the Zehnder ComfoSpot 50 ventilation unit with heat recovery.

It has the following control board:

The control board of Zehnder Comfospot 50. Connector “SENSOR X8” is used for the temperature and humidity sensor while “BUS X7” is for the external control panel.

The “BUS X7” has four pins labeled +, A, B and - which are used for connecting to an external ComfoLED control panel which replicates the functionality of the built-in control panel. The 8-pin chip below the “BUS X7” is a MAX487 RS-485/RS-422 transceiver.

It appears to be using the UART protocol at 9600 baud rate, 9 data bits, 1 stop bit and 0 parity bits. The one extra bit is used to indicate an address byte and a data byte in a “single master, multiple slaves” or “single controller, multiple responders” setup. With the most significant bit (MSB) indicating the the byte type (multi-drop bus or MDB) we get two address bytes and the rest as data bytes.

The device appears to be sending two sequences of bytes on pin A at 76ms intervals:

Data packets sent by the master/controller device at 76ms intervals.
Data packets sent by the master/controller device at 76ms intervals.

First packet:

Data sent to address 0x01 0x04 in hex notation.
Data packet sent to device address 0x01 0x03 in hex notation.

and the second packet:

Data sent to address 0x01 0x04 in hex notation.
Data sent to address 0x01 0x04 in hex notation.

I’ve haven’t been able to figure out which devices these could be and what data is being sent to them.

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5 Comments

  1. Lorenz says:
    November 7, 2022 at 12:31

    Hi Kaspars,
    Did you get anywhere with this project? I‘m considering to get my Comfospots into my home automation with ESPs.
    Right now I’m considering my options to control the Comfospots and to get the current state. Either via the control panel 14 pin connector which sits directly on the unit itself or via the RS BUS you analyzed here.
    Cheers
    Lorenz

    Reply
    • Toni says:
      June 6, 2023 at 17:41

      hello Kaspars and Lorenz,
      do you have any news? I have Comfoair70 units which have the same interfaces. My goal is to integrate them without the cloud into my home assistant, but I am lacking of reverse engineering knowledge.
      Thanks in advance
      Toni

      Reply
      • Lorenz says:
        October 10, 2023 at 09:47

        Hi Toni,
        Sorry for the late reply, but I didn’t get any notification about your reply ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
        I’ve built a solution for myself using ESPHome to integrate all functions into Home Assistant.
        When I find the time, I will try to publish the ESPHome config and the board I built on GitHub.
        If you want, you can ping me over there.
        https://github.com/thatslolo

        Reply
  2. Christian says:
    October 21, 2023 at 22:35

    Hi Lorenz, I’d also be very interested in what you have achieved so far. Could you please drop me a message? I couldn’t find any contact information on your github profile.

    Reply
  3. Carlos says:
    December 5, 2023 at 15:41

    Hi Lorenz,
    I’m also interested. I tried reaching you on the home assistant community forum. For me it doesn’t have to be perfect, just trying to get started on a (Micro)Python implementation. Thanks!
    Regards, Carlos

    Reply

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