the0ne

Last summer was so busy that I couldn't even once take out the electronics and connect them to the hot-tub. I still got everything prepared for debugging but for the next months it'll be too cold outside.

That's quite interesting - it's definitely not the same here. I start to suspect that something isn't perfectly smooth on my electronics setup. I just had to disconnect both the IQ2020 and the touchpad at the same time to get any communication - it had stopped completely after I had caused too much of a timeout.

That's fantastic @darkwin, with your information I hope I can avoid having to hard-reset the touchpad every time I interrupt the communication too long during debugging. Thanks for the hint! 😃

Well, I thought about the "seems to be impossible to do this in any other way" I stated above. Actually there must be a better/easier way to do this, looking at the Spa Network Adapter (SNA) in the image: The "Connextion" app then offered all the fancy information and settings that you'd expect to be able to monitor and control. Same with the FreePad that basically was a RF remote: My point is that both of those do not have to intercept the IQ2020<->touchpad communication so there must be a simpler way to communicate with the IQ2020. I want to find out if anybody does actually successfully intercept and modify the messages between IQ2020 and the touchpad. If not, maybe we need to focus on analyzing the pairing between the IQ2020 and the Freepad or the SNA.

Thanks a lot to @infinitenothingand others for providing your information here. Fantastic work! Some information is still missing in this thread, that I want to add here - e.g. the RS422 baud rate which is 115200. Also I feel that from the pictures above it's maybe not 100% clear which connection to intercept. It's the one on right of the main IQ2020 board, not the one(s) on the "hub" that Hotspring adds on top of their IQ2020 board. The correct one is the white plug in a white socket on the right side and that plug has the lower six of the eight pins of the socket connected to its cables. Actually it really seems to be impossible to do this in any other way except by intercepting messages. Really sad as in the beginning I was hoping to find an easier, less intrusive, solution but didn't get lucky. The IQ2020 really seems to isolate the "hmi" part of the system (touchpad, wireless touchpad, etc.) from the "utility" part of the system (ace/freshwater, ozone, music, etc.). Regarding the HW interface, I'm using an ESP32 board with two cheap RS422/TTL converters for less than 4€ each. The TE connector was luckily available for order at the Conrad webshop. I noticed that once I stop forwarding messages for more than a second or two, I sometimes need to "restart" the wireless touchpad communication by disconnecting + reconnecting. I plan to add a relay to one of the ESP32 pins so that this can be done automatically whenever the ESP32 starts up, making sure that the touchpad-base and the IQ2020 can re-sync. So far I was able to log the data, but the "protocol" (the data inside) looks really, well - "interesting" to say the least. I want to be able to monitor and control the whirlpool from my mobile. The ESP32 can directly connect to the outside world via MQTTs which would be perfect for what I want, with instant reaction from all over the world. The tricky part for me is to get more information on how to make the IQ2020 actually change settings, take actions, etc. Also it's not really clear to me how the data content inside the messages are to be read. So if you have any more information than the above, I ask you to please let me know! Thanks in advance! 😃