Yet another Hacker News

Reverse Engineering My Coway Air Purifier to Ditch the Cloud

60 points scottjg 16 hours ago 13 comments

bombcar 30 minutes ago | parent

I took a Vornado TRANSOM, a Broadlink RM4, and a Shelly Smart Plug, a Qingping Air Quality Monitor Gen 2 + claude and HASS, and now I have a fan that turns itself on when the CO2 level gets too high.

And I can override or change it from Apple Home.

The smart plug lets it verify that the fan is actually running, (because it measures usage) and we worked out that after a power cycle the Vornado goes back to a known state, and we can find the speed by forcing it all the way to 4 and then stepping back.

nijave 22 minutes ago | parent

Small world, just submitted PRs to add Vornado Strata 433mhz decoder to rtl_sdr :)

Need to try to get Sonoff bridge rigged up next but have been busy messing with Hatch alarm

deadbabe 21 minutes ago | parent

I love how it has become a trend now to take some device that required a cloud subscription, reverse engineer it, then connect it to your own server you control.

Suddenly there are so many products to play with that would have previously been undesirable! This is one of the good things AI has enabled.

jerf 10 minutes ago | parent

Enjoy it while you can. You can see the AI companies have already started the process of locking us out of this, with Opus 5.5.

God forbid our fans, our fans of all things, might be broken of their dependencies on the internet. The plebians can't be allowed to do that. Every relay must be cloud-connected so it can be monetized and disabled for whatever dumb ass reasons someone might want to disable it.

Zopieux 7 minutes ago | parent

Just use abliterated/uncensored self-hosted models. This is why we need them and the hardware to run them. Yes, the API models which will further close the walled gardens will evolve faster than the open-weights ones, but I'm hopeful about the community as a hole rejecting this status quo.

nijave 21 minutes ago | parent

This one yeets in a CA insecurely but eMudhra has been a gift for any that bake the CA--especially the abandonware unlikely to ever get patched.

phillmv 17 minutes ago | parent

i truly wish these things were not smart in the first place

noja 13 minutes ago | parent

I have a light with a controller on the cord: brightness up/down, power. I can't use a smart plug with it because it always defaults to off. Any ideas?

bluGill 4 minutes ago | parent

Cut the controller off and use the smart plug to control brightness. You might need to open it up and replace the power supply.

I'm going to guess that you will spend more money on this than just buying a light that has smart features compatible with your smart home ecosystem. You can't mix two smart systems on one cord - this has never worked. Where to put the smart is a tricky question as there are pros and cons to every answer, but in general the smarts need to be in exactly one place or things won't work.

varispeed 13 minutes ago | parent

On topic, can you recommend a good air purifier to run in the office? 500 sq ft?

I am tired of having dust everywhere.

Zopieux 9 minutes ago | parent

I'm a simple man. I see people freeing their devices from proprietary clouds and reclaiming ownership, I upvote.

microtonal 6 minutes ago | parent

I am a simple man. When I see people buy devices with Zigbee, Z-Wave, or other fully local protocols, I nod. When I see people reward vendors that lock in with their money, I shake.

Aurornis 5 minutes ago | parent

> The fan downloads its root CA cert over plain HTTP. It was always MitM-able.

The most fascinating part of this wave of LLM reverse engineering is seeing how many weird and poor choices we’re lying in plain sight.

Any number of people could have discovered and exploited this, but it’s tedious work. Most people who can do this are busy with their job and other things. Now LLMs enable people who understand these things to quickly get through the tedious parts, so they can do a lot more of this work in their free time than they could before.