Advantage Air makes smart air conditioning systems in Australia, a place with a very captive summer audience. The wall controller, which turns it on and off, is a lowest-conceivable tier Android contraption doomed to fail the second the warranty expires—and they see you coming a mile off, charging $1245 for a replacement and trying to tack on all sorts of extras. One customer, gstar, saw them coming and realized you can replace the setup with any old Android tablet and a little clever work.
E-Zone running perfectly on an ancient Samsung Galaxy Tab 4. I was elated. After I gave up on repairing the original, getting this tablet working took only a few hours and was a hell of a lot of fun. This tablet is 10+ years old and yet still is much snappier than the junk that came with the system, but if I want to upgrade to something more powerful, say to control my homeassistant etc… all I need to do is plug it into the usb. But for turning the AC on and off it is more than enough and I am currently waiting on a nice flush connector to arrive then will mount it on the wall.
$1679 for a $7 gadget and a $20 display, a plastic box to stuff them in, and the unnecessary sensor replacements they tried to sell him on. What an outrageous swindle. See the Hacker News thread for more useful info about these systems and how to hack them.
