Hack RF – A Dreo CLF513S ceiling fan shipped with a cloud-only smart home setup—until one tinkerer mapped its RF remote, captured commands on 433.92 MHz, and replayed them through an ESP32-C6, MQTT, and Home Assistant. The result: local control that doesn’t depend on th
The Dreo CLF513S ceiling fan looked like an easy win at first. Sam Wilkinson had found something cheap, properly sized, and reliably effective at moving air. But the fan’s out-of-the-box smart-home setup came with an ugly constraint: it only worked with a cloud-only ecosystem.
So Sam didn’t accept the limitation. He started with what was already on hand—the included remote control.
The first question was simple: how did the remote actually talk to the fan? Sam determined it had to be RF, because it didn’t require line of sight to work properly. He then checked the device itself. The FCC ID printed on the back of the remote also pointed to that same conclusion.
From there, the job became engineering. Sam figured out the commands the remote sent, then built a way to replay those exact signals. Instead of treating the fan like a sealed consumer product, he connected the replay tool to his existing Home Assistant setup.
The radio piece mattered. The remote used 433.92 MHz, a frequency band Sam noted is not uncommon for these appliances. To capture the fan’s remote traffic, he enlisted an RTL-SDR and watched the transmissions until the pattern made sense. A spectrogram showed the remote relied on simple on-off keying to send commands.
With the signal captured, Sam moved to a controller that could reproduce it. He grabbed an ESP32-C6 microcontroller and paired it with an RFM69HCW radio transceiver. Then he programmed the ESP32-C6 to replay the fan’s on/off command.
That wasn’t the end of the integration—just the core bridge. Sam added MQTT so the ESP32 could control the fan in a way that fit naturally inside his Home Assistant ecosystem. Once it was all wired together. he effectively turned the cloud-dependent fan into something he could steer locally from the system he was already using.
The quiet point behind all of this is familiar to anyone who’s tried to buy “smart” without surrendering control: smart home gear often doesn’t match tastes or budgets straight out of the box. In this case, the workaround wasn’t a new device. It was the willingness to take the remote apart. learn how it speaks. and rewrite the rules—so the fan answers to Home Assistant instead of a cloud service.
If you’re tweaking your own gear to better fit your smart home, notify the tipsline—because this kind of practical hacking is exactly what turns off-the-shelf hardware into something that finally feels like it belongs to you.
Dreo CLF513S ceiling fan hacking RF remote 433.92 MHz RTL-SDR ESP32-C6 RFM69HCW MQTT Home Assistant smart home tinkering
So they hacked the fan to work without the cloud? Cool but also why is it even cloud-only in the first place lol.
My cousin tried something like this with a thermostat and it never worked again. Like I don’t trust any of this RF stuff, 433 MHz sounds sketchy.
Wait, I thought 433.92 MHz was like garage door openers, not ceiling fans. So he basically just copied the remote signals and now it’s local? I mean good for him, but isn’t that kind of… illegal? or am I mixing it up with something else.
This is why I don’t buy “smart” anything. They lock it to the cloud then someone on YouTube fixes it with an ESP32 and Home Assistant. Next they’ll make it so you can only use it if you agree to their terms forever. Also the article says remote ON/OFF keying like that’s normal… my brain is fried. I just want my fan to turn on.