Hehe that Levoit hack is pretty cool.
Philips replied, but they say that it only works with Alexa and those kinds of things, of course. Nice that they read the question and replied, but I’m returning that one.
I ended up going with the IKEA one for various unrelated reasons (I thought the airflow would be directional, like a fan, and I prefer for it to communicate locally). It’s mostly working, but I’ll describe what I had to do anyway.
I have a Sonoff Zigbee dongle based on the Ember chipset. The openHAB binding worked right away, and I could connect the IKEA Starkvind unit. It only had one channel though, for the fan speed. That wasn’t sufficient for me, so I wanted to try Zigbee2mqtt (Z2M). I’m a fan of MQTT and I have an infrastructure to run docker containers, so it’s a pretty good fit.
Z2M refused to talk to my dongle because the firmware was too old. I had to perform an intricate and scary update procedure,including removing the dongle’s case to get to the buttons, but to my surprise it didn’t brick the dongle and it worked.
Now Z2M worked, and I figured I’d try the HomeAssistant component, instead of adding all the channels/topics manually. This worked well, and openHAB discovered the bridge and the air purifier, with a great selection of channels
The first two channels don’t really work though, but I can set it to auto mode using “Preset Mode” and turn it off using “Speed”. Seems that Z2M uses a json-based message format instead of just sending the commands / values. So I can’t work around this issue by creating a plain normal MQTT channel (and ignore the HomeAssistant stuff) At the moment I don’t really need to control the fan speed directly, so this is fine.
Thanks all for the discussion and insight, now I will create a couple of rules and call it a day.
Edit: Oh, and the IKEA seems like a quite good unit, in terms of quality, range of speeds, etc. I don’t know how well it actually works, but so far, I like it.