Remote Control Code for Japanese Kitchen Hood
The kitchen hood (known as “range hood” in Japan) in my apartment has IR remote control functionality but the remote control doesn’t come standard. I wanted to link it with my SwitchBot to be able to be able to easily turn it off from the dining table if it was accidentally left running.
Searching for the manufacturer (Takara Standard) did not yield any result in any IR remote database. I was going to give up and buy the official remote for 3000 JPY when I tried just searching for “range hood remote” and found one interesting fact — basically all kitchen hood in Japan use the same remote code!
The reason is that there is linkage function between the kitchen range and the kitchen hood. The kitchen range has an IR emitter to send remote control code to the kitchen hood to turn on when the range is turned on and to turn off after a while when the range is turned off. Without using the same remote control code, that linkage would not be possible.
And like miracle, I’ve found this blog post in Japanese noting the signal emitted by the kitchen range when turning on and off. Thus, I was about to find the device address and brute-force the command code of each function.
The device code is D=135, S=81 and the command codes are as follows:
- Off: F=128
- Low: F=129
- Medium: F=130
- High: F=131
- Light Bulb: F=132
- Timer: F=133
- Linkage on: F=138
- Toggle low/medium/high: F=139 (might be specific to my appliance)
- Linkage off: F=140
The linkage on/off works as follows (at least on my kitchen hood):
- Linkage on: Turn on the hood if off
- Linkage off: Set a timer to turn off after 3 minutes, but only if the hood was turned on via “linkage on”
After discovering the codes, I tried having SwitchBot learn the code, but unfortunately, the receiver on my kitchen hood did not have line-of-sight to my SwitchBot Hub, so in the end, I was not able to automate it with the SwitchBot.
