IMPORTANT: the current master branch is broken. Please clone tag 1.1.11 until further notice.
This is an alternative unofficial Homey app for controlling air conditioning and air-to-air heat pump devices via the Panasonic Comfort Cloud service. Air-to-water (Aquarea) devices are not supported.
A discussion topic can be found here.
There's already an unofficial Homey app for PCC (referred to as "the original app" below), but it's closed source, with no official forum, and is maintained by a single, hard-to-reach developer. An ad-hoc community thread for the original app has gathered here.
Late 2022, Panasonic imposed rate-limiting on their authentication service. The original app stopped working - showing "internal server error" or "ServerError" in Homey. (It probably authenticates on every service request, ignoring the auth token.)
The alternative app presented here is virtually identical in behaviour, except that authentication occurs only once, and the auth token is reused until it expires.
Panasonic makes frequent changes to their auth flow - I'm sure these are improvements for the better (security, stability), but since they don't treat their services as public, there are no announcements or documentation. Home automation developers have no choice but to discover changes and breakage after the fact, and react - often having to study and/or reverse engineer Panasonic's own apps in order to understand how. You just need to be aware that, because of this, the app may stop working at any moment. Ideally Panasonic maintained their own home automation system integrations, or at least provided documentation and a transparent release cycle for their auth and services. Instead, this app relies heavily (almost entirely!) on the community contributions from developers like marc2016, without whose panasonic-comfort-cloud-client package, this app (and probably others) would either not exist or be broken for much longer periods.
This app is not published to Homey store - for me, the effort I'd have to spend on polishing is not worth it. Athom is also likely to drag their feet approving it, because of the existence of the original app. Also, because Panasonic is not providing the API as a publicly reliable service, I'm thoroughly discouraged from taking on responsibility (no matter how tenuous) for a working app in an official app store.
Currently, the only option is to install the app manually from a PC:
- set up the Homey CLI (also make sure you keep it up to date),
- authenticate with
homey loginand select your Homey, - run
npm installin your cloned repo folder (this downloads dependencies required by the app), - run
homey app installin your cloned repo folder (this installs the app on your Homey).
The app has not been through any kind of QA beyond myself and a few users testing it. Having said that, it's been running stable for me for a long time.
The credentials must be provided in the app settings. It is recommended that you create distinct credentials for Homey. Credentials must be created using the official PCC app (Android/iPhone), and must be granted permission to control your device(s).
You should disable the original app, otherwise it's likely to keep causing your credentials to be blocked. If your credentials are currently blocked, they won't work any better in my app. You might have to wait up to 24 hours before the block lifts, or you can create new credentials.
Avoid using both apps at the same time, at least against the same devices - you risk that they "compete" applying their settings to your devices, resulting in much more traffic to the servers and in wearing your devices down.
Note that any flows using the original app must be updated - and there may be missing functionality in my app. You may want to duplicate your existing flows and keep the originals disabled (as a backup), in case you want to switch back.
There are flow cards for setting capabilities other than target temperature (thanks, nickmurison!).
The settings page shows the most recent log contents. If you have a problem, please copy and paste the entire log into a Github issue, or send me a direct message if you're concerned about privacy.
The log contains the user name (somewhat obfuscated) and PCC device names and IDs (but never the password, obviously).
- Jarl Larsen for fixing per-device action cards and adding alwayson support
- Magnus Rydjord for PCC app version autodetection code, outdoor temp and avg W consumption
- Nick Murison for adding more flow cards.
- Vegard Svendsen for the original Homey app.
- The app relies heavily on panasonic-comfort-cloud-client. The main reason I got the app working within a couple of hours!
- Athom provides an easy to use CLI, SDK and app template. The combined quality ensured I hit the ground running.
- Thanks to the maintainers of Homey Community Store for providing a home!
- Icon downloaded from SVG Repo.