How to: Pentair Easytouch/Intellitouch pool/spa controller

Please see the top of this thread for some introduction to the protocol.

 

An RS-485 Ethernet server such as http://www.digi.com/products/serialservers/digionesp will encapsulate the RS-485 traffic and make it available as a TCP or UDP stream. From a PC a program such as "netcat" can connect to the Ethernet Server and dump the traffic to a file. What you will end up with is a binary file containing all of the traffic. A program such as hexdump or any hex editor can be used to read the file to attempt and decode it. Since the protocol is non-documented, this is a non-trivial task.

 

Having been down this road, it is a lot of work. Take a long look at the Autelis Pool Control for Pentair http://www.autelis.com/homeautomation/pool-spa.html and check out their wiki - they have done the critical work. If you can talk them into supporting Intellichlor it will be a lot less time spent than trying to roll your own.

yeah I tried to reach out to them, but most of their stuff is out of stock and I have not heard back from them. I wasn't even sure if they are still in business. I will try again.