I want to connect my air conditioning unit (mitsubishi heat pump) to our wifi network using an Atom Lite. The ac unit has a serial connector delivering 5V power and also using 5V signalling for RX/TX via a JST PA connector. To keep it neat, I was going to use a USB-C cable with breakout wires and a JST connector to wire them directly.

I’m aware that the PICO board in the Atom Lite uses 3.3V for signalling, but there appears to be a regulator in the circuit board diagram for the USB-C port. I think that means I can connect the ac unit RX/TX pins directly to the USB DP/DM wires.

Is anyone able to confirm?

In case it’s useful, I was planning to use esphome to flash the Atom Lite based on this code: https://github.com/geoffdavis/esphome-mitsubishiheatpump. The producer of the underlying arduino software noted the need for regulators for other ESP boards: https://github.com/SwiCago/HeatPump#other-part-suggestions.

Thanks.