I recently moved into a new apartment which I used as an opportunity to make our home a little smarter. As a big open source supporter I built my smart home platform with Home Assistant of course.
Unfortunately, there are still far too few products that are directly compatible with Home Assistant. Especially in the area of humidifiers where I only found products that rely on a proprietary app or cloud from the manufacturer. Something that I would like to avoid at all costs. For one thing, such dependence is a certain form of planned obsolescence, as the product becomes useless as soon as the app loses its compatibility with new smartphone operating system versions or the manufacturer’s cloud is no longer operated.
Therefore, it was important for me to find a smart humidifier that integrates directly with my Home Assistant setup. To achieve this goal, I identified two options:
Add sensors / actuators to a classic humidifier to make it smart. Replace the firmware of a smart humidifier with my own source code.
I decided to use the second approach, because it required less effort, since I would have had to implement my own firmware anyway.
Next, I was faced with the task of finding a suitable humidifier whose firmware I could easily replace. I specifically looked for devices that contained an ESP8266 or ESP32 microcontroller from Espressif, because for these I could easily create a new firmware with ESPHome.
ESPHome is a system that allows you to control your ESP8266/ESP32 through simple but powerful configuration files and remotely control it through home automation systems.
Xiaomi Mi Smart Antibacterial Humidifier.
Thanks to Sören Beye /Hypfer , I quickly became aware of the Xiaomi Mi Smart Antibacterial Humidifier, as Sören himself wrote his own firmware for this humidifier.
Unfortunately, his original version of the customized firmware ( /Hypfer/esp8266-deerma-humidifier ) is no longer compatible with the current version of the producr, as Xiaomi has modified the internal communication protocol.
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