The 0th thing: I'm Hungarian, who learned English from only the Internet and specifically YouTube. I'm trying my best, but if I'm not clear somewhere, ask.
I will first briefly explain the project I'm doing, just so you can understand the background of my problem better. tl;dr: It's complicated, and understanding it is not necessary to answer my core question. You can skip it.
I'm building a homemade air conditioning and garden watering system. It uses the cold well-water from our drilled well (I'm not sure, how it's called in English, in Hungarian it's a "fúrt kút". Basically, a tube is drilled down into the ground, to ~80 m (~262 feet).
It brings the aquifer water (the ground water below a layer of clay) up from there.). The water that comes from the well is no matter the weather 14°C (57.2°F). We'd use the water to water our garden anyway, so why not chill the house as a fortunate side-effect?
I use a used air conditioner indoor unit to extract the coldness of the water.
Everything is controlled with two Arduino, one Mega controls all the solenoid valves, pumps, and everything, and is outside in the garage. And one Uno is inside the house and acts as a thermostat, and controls the indoor unit. How strongly to blow, when to circulate the water, according to the temperature. The two Ardus are communicating on Serial (I'm using the EasyTransfer library, but that's irrelevant).
The problem:
I want to control the indoor unit with an Arduino Uno. The things that I want to control:
The stepper motor of the... This thing: (I have no idea how it's called)
It would be nice to be able to move the blades up and down controlled. However, the motor is a stepper motor, for wich, many tutorials exist, so I'm not in need of help here. Here are the pictures from the blade moving stepper anyway:
The fan motor of the indoor unit. And this is the bigger challenge, and also the more important one. Here are some pictures.
The motor is powered by PWM, at 230V-s. I've dug around for an hour, and have still no idea how it should be wired up. But I've gathered some information: There is a speed sensor built in, I have no need for that, I will experiment out the speeds, and that's it, no need for active control. The motor is an asynchronous motor.
I would like to have around 3 speeds that I can control with the Arduino. Unfortunately, it's not as simple as building a 230V PWM.
I am not surprised that you are lost! I got lost trying to understand what you are having problems with! Tell us how much you have done with Arduino and electronics and we might be able to help.
Also, I tried to Google search for something on the Chigo YDK-16-4 motor and how it operates, but was only successful in discovering it is a 3-speed AC motor running at 1150/950/740 RPM, but nothing on how to control the speed. It is not PWM powered as you described.
It seems my Google-fu is better Within seconds I was watching this video where someone explains exactly how this motor works and is controlled. After some fiddling with subtitles and automatic translation of them (totally awesome feature!) and I could even get an understanding of what it is all about. Many more videos, apparently all Spanish, about this specific A/C motor.
Do watch the video for more understanding, and confirm the colours.
Red: AC power.
Capacitor 1.5 uF (value?): between red and white wire.
Connect yellow to the other AC power wire: lowest speed.
Connect blue to the other AC power wire: medium speed.
Connect black to the other AC power wire: maximum speed.
So to control this through an Arduino you have to use three relays: one for each wire (and make sure you can close only one relay at a time - or strange things may happen).
Many thanks, I will try it out tomorrow! (And post here the results if anyone is interested)
Yeah, probably I also have found that video (or at least had it come up in Google), but I've never clicked on it, haven't even thought of watching a non-english video.
If it's really this simple, than, wow.
Huge thanks, again!
p.s.
And I will be definetly less afraid to turn on auto translated subtitles. I have a bad bias to GTranslate, because it's really really bad in Hungarian. Like not even close to the original meaning. But thanks for the reminder, it's not bad in indo-german to indo-german
Yeah, I know. The water is going to go through a filter. But non-distilled water will cause some problems after a while, no matter what. I will probably upgrade it to be a closed system next year.
Filter is good for debris that may be in the water; dehardening is done by adding a salt, as it's a chemical thing. Hard water means you have lots calcium and magnesium salts dissolved.
In an unheated A/C system this shouldn't be a problem, the carbonate deposits only occur when heating (at around 80 C or so). That's why you have those mineral deposits in washing machines and water heaters.
Yes, but the water also will inevitably erode the heat exchanger (because it has some acid/base effect), rust will form, and eventually, there will be a hole. So not mineral deposits are what I'm afraid of.
The easiest way usually to remote control an air conditioner, is to reverse engineer the remote control unit .
These are normally fairly simple IR controllers of which you can read the data output simply by using one of these.
You will still need to figure out what the data actually means though.
Yes, this is a different question. That's why I declared the post [SOLVED], I have an answer to the original question. But help and advice are always appreciated.
I've thought of that as well, but don't want to do that. I mean, if the previously stated solution doesn't work (I will try it out today; haven't yet), then I will have to use the original controller.
But I would like to be in full control. The original had a lot of functions, that I don't need: heating, dehumidifying, timer, economy mode, etc.
And also, I would have to get an IR transmitter, which takes weeks to get to me (shipping to Hungary from China is not quick).
So yes, It would work that way too, but it's not practical in my case, if the previously proposed solution is correct.
Aaand I need the space of the original controller, a few relays, and other electronics of my hand's work will be there. So it's sad, but it has to go.
EDIT: No more updates, actually. I had to cut down the scope of the project due to time constraints, and never did any of this, I'm just using the original controller with the original remote. Maybe in the future will get a transmitter and do it that way.
Within seconds I was watching 
