If you’re looking for “smart” home appliances, there’s no shortage of options on the market. Even relatively low-end gadgets are jumping on the Internet of Things bandwagon these days (for better or for worse). But what if you’re not looking to purchase a brand new major appliance right now? In that case, you might be interested in seeing how [Giulio Pons] added some high-tech features to his existing air conditioner on the cheap.

Since his AC unit had an infrared remote control, the first thing [Giulio] needed to do was come up with a way to emulate it. An easy enough project using the ESP8266 and an IR LED, especially when he found that somebody had already written a IR communications library for his particular brand of AC. From there, he could start tacking on sensors and functionality.

With the addition of a DHT11 sensor, [Giulio] can have the AC turn on and off based on the current room temperature. It also gives him an easy way to verify the AC is actually on and operating. By checking to see if the room starts cooling off after sending the IR command to start the AC, his software can determine whether it should try resending the code, or maybe send a notification to alert him that something doesn’t seem right. Of course, it wouldn’t be a proper ESP8266 project without some Internet connectivity, so he’s also created a smartphone application that lets him control the system while away from home.

Now admittedly nothing in this project is exactly new, we’ve seen plenty of hackers switch on their AC with the ESP8266 at this point. But what we particularly liked was how well thought out and documented the whole process was. The rationale behind each decision is explained, and he even documented things like his network topology to help illustrate how the whole system comes together. Even if the techniques are well known by many of us, this is the kind of project documentation that makes it accessible to newcomers. Our hats off to [Giulio] for going the extra mile.

In the past we’ve seen a similar project that allowed you to control your AC from Slack, and our very own [Maya Posch] took us on a whirlwind tour of the very impressive ESP8266-powered environmental monitoring system she helped develop.