Freeing a Xiaomi Humidifier from the Cloud
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.