Samsung Vacuum Cleaner

A number of years ago we purchased a Samsung robot vacuum cleaner (INSERT MODEL HERE). It came with an IR remote control, which we never found much use for. Fast forward to 2020 and my foray into Home Assistant, and suddenly IR is more interesting. Coupled with a an IR transmitter, I now have a way of controlling my vacuum cleaner.

The important codes for my model are:

Power On/Off - 0x818100FF
Start/Stop - 0x818110EF
Recharge - 0x8181807F

Using the Tasmota IR firmware, the command to send one of these codes for MQTT follows the form:

'{"Protocol":"SAMSUNG","Bits":32,"Data":"0x818100FF","DataLSB":"0x818100FF","Repeat":0}'

This should be sent to the cmnd/irsend topic.

Integrating into Home Assistant looks like this:

- platform: mqtt
  name: "Sammy"
  supported_features:
    - turn_on
    - turn_off
    - return_home
    - pause
    - stop
  command_topic: "tasmota/6E6F05/cmnd/irsend"
  payload_turn_on: "{\"Protocol\":\"SAMSUNG\",\"Bits\":32,\"Data\":\"0x818100FF\",\"DataLSB\":\"0x818100FF\",\"Repeat\":0}"
  payload_turn_off: "{\"Protocol\":\"SAMSUNG\",\"Bits\":32,\"Data\":\"0x818100FF\",\"DataLSB\":\"0x818100FF\",\"Repeat\":0}"
  payload_return_to_base: "{\"Protocol\":\"SAMSUNG\",\"Bits\":32,\"Data\":\"0x8181807F\",\"DataLSB\":\"0x818101FE\",\"Repeat\":0}"
  payload_start_pause: "{\"Protocol\":\"SAMSUNG\",\"Bits\":32,\"Data\":\"0x818110EF\",\"DataLSB\":\"0x818108F7\",\"Repeat\":0}"
  payload_stop: "{\"Protocol\":\"SAMSUNG\",\"Bits\":32,\"Data\":\"0x818110EF\",\"DataLSB\":\"0x818108F7\",\"Repeat\":0}"

With the cleaner out of the dock, the dock seems to transmit some sort of homing signal, also via IR. This could potentially spam your receiver, which in turn would spam your MQTT server. A simple solution here is to disable the GPIO used for the IR receiver in your device.

I'm interested in setting this up to turn on the vacuum cleaner once everyone leaves the house. This may need to be done in conjunction with the alarm (ie disabling the zone where the cleaner is active), however this will take some more testing.