We’re a couple that absolutely loves to camp and has spend many months on the road. Right now, we’re in the middle of converting a Volkswagen Crafter (“Bob”) into what will hopefully be our home on wheels.

One of us has a background in electronics, so when our two Maxxair fans arrived and both a RJ45 port and RJ11 phone jack were spotted, we were going down a rabbit hole. Figuring out how the fans actually work, reverse engineering their analog protocol from a picture of the first party remote, and eventually designing a small circuit board that could talk to them digitally. Once we had it working with our Raspberry Pi 5 we could finally control both fans directly from our Home Assistant (Van Assistant?) instance.

We figured others might find it helpful too, and that is why you’re on this site right now! VanTurtle is just us, building things we wish existed, and making them available for anyone else who’s doing the same kind of projects.

We’re always happy to help so shoot us an email at questions@vanturtle.com if you have any questions, or just want to talk about vans.

Many thanks to user windsor on fordtransitusaforum.com for taking the high resolution of the first party wall remote