Breaking Free from DRM: Hacking My Air Purifier
unethical.info
unethical.info
As a user it's important to know that you have an authentic, original (and new) HEPA filter. So while it's a cool hack, I really hope that this doesn't result in a flood of low quality counterfeit filters on the market.
Sure, quality varies, but they should all function well enough for domestic function of capturing dust and pollen.
I say this as someone who has terrible allergy, I know when they work and when they don’t, no lab equipment necessary.
The the main thing that matters in air purifier is size, for delivering volume of cleaned air.
The problem is we keep putting them into strange shapes like cylinders and every purifier has an incompatible cartridge. And also we made a filter and a fan into a strange luxury product that costs hundreds of dollars.
I will be switching to IKEA purifiers because they are flat, simple, and filters are cheap.
I remember when manufacturers competed to make their products desirable, and appliances came with schematics.
Absolutely. cf. https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/14/business/bmw-subscription/ind... as just one example of dozens, if not hundreds.
I have to say though, mine doesn't obey the DRM. It warns you if there is no sticker, but it works fine.
It's unavoidable that if customers have behavior X, such as tending to go for the cheapest thing, sellers in the market will develop clever strategies to game that behavior. Retailers go so far as to research how the colors, shapes, and surface textures of packaging affect buying behavior, so of course they are also going to intensively study customer price sensitivity behavior too.
I've learned that with a lot of things such as appliances, tools, and some electronics it's actually cheaper to buy the higher-end model. It's cheaper to buy one good one than two or three pieces of junk that break easily.
They just don't realize the tradeoff they're making until it's too late.
Why aren't people doing the most basic of research before buying things?
Fundamentally you can make more money by overcharging for consumables and undercharging for the product itself, than you can by "fairly" charging for both. In any product or industry with high entry costs (read: low risk of new competitor market entrant showing up), many businesses realistically are going to leave that kind of money on the table?
I'm a little disappointed, to say the least.
On the other hand, after putting it on the Wi-Fi, everything was able to print without the addition of any crapware drivers. Win some lose some?
Safety razors aren't a direct substitute for a modern standard shaving razor, even if it's arguably better.
Brother printers don't have DRM (yay!) but the toner cartridges are definitely being sold at a huge markup. That's OK because the price is fine with me, but they're still using the same "cheap product, expensive consumables" pricing model as everyone else. How could they not?
Be aware that at least some brother lasers you have to replace another part every 10,000 sheets, which is the duration of two to five toner replacements. I am unsure if it's the heater or the laser or what.
Haven’t replaced it in 10 years, haven’t reached the limit yet ;)
The market is flooded with DRM-free Air Purifiers.
You can get an old school safety razor for under $20 and it will last forever. They are what double sided razor blades (the kind you normally see used in movies to split cocaine) were designed to fit into. Good razor blades can be found at a rate of about $0.05-$0.10 per, and last about 4-5 shaves - for me at least - before they start going dull and pulling. They also get me as clean of a shave as any other razor
Still not sure why people pay 10x more on cartridge systems, but maybe I'm just weird
Ultimately, electric razors are my favorite. You have to do a fair amount of work to get a close shave, but you also don't have to later up and you shove it in a charging base to clean it every day. I'm not sure it saves much money (when you replace the foils as recommended), but it is convenient and does a good enough job for me.
I'd argue that this technique is borderline fraud. It plays against the common assumptions of what the product is without advertising it.
"sleek" "modern" "futuristic" "design"
I'm that close to do the same for my child's nightlight: just shunt power around whatever is opening the circuit and drive it with a Shelly plug.
(Okay the grand idea would be to ultimately put an ESP32 between the control unit and the three buttons, so that I can both operate it manually yet have full control of the thing; not the least because if you cut power it resets its state to a static white light. Never done that so that'd be nice way to acquire the skill without much risk to that super cheap device)
Thing should either be dumb and do everything you want with a button, or smart and then at least you get programmability.
For simple things like lights it’s usually better use of time to buy Yeelight nightlight and then you get to control it through HomeKit:home assistant/their app.
You mean the soft buttons? yeah it's nuts, not the least because since it's reacting to an impulse (either pull down to mass or pull up from mass) there's gotta be a constant power draw - however small (my Shelly plug measures it as non-zero <0.1~0.5W) - to the logic board to compare it against.
(warning: back of the envelope calculation)
At scale on a house one would have a bunch of such soft button devices†, cumulatively it might be on the 1~5W scale. Across a 1M city it's going to be 1~5MW.
It's made worse by these devices having cheap transformers or switched mode power supplies whose non-linearity drive the power factor down to 0.5~0.7, which means it's pumping real energy production to 2~8MVA (plus on the utility side electrical hardware needs to be scaled up because e.g loss doubles)
Which means for my town we're basically throwing 50~200MVAh a day right down the drain - or rather either burned up in the air or buried down "places that are not of honour" - because it doesn't make sense to have power factor correction economically (either on the device maker side, which would rise the BOM a few cents up, on the residential side where the cost is prohibitive, or on the individual size where people prefer buying cheap, electrically terrible, knockoff devices). Because yeah, in the EU passive PFC - which raises PF ~0.5 to ~0.85 - is mandated above >75W only.
Comparatively to the overall energy production and usage it's small, but in absolute terms it boggles the mind that as a society we're able to handwave such amounts of energy.
† I'm not counting stuff like powerbanks or chargers but again back of the envelope it should overall fold into the range, making the worst case conservative.
Automations allow me to run the purifier at Medium/High speed for certain times a day, even when I am not around. Other than that, they are always on Auto - so they produce minimal noise.
However, certain times a day for period of 15-30 mins or so, they run at Medium/High so they can do certain number of air changes in a room of x SQFT.
Having a 'computer' also allows them to detect when a room suddenly becomes less 'sanitized' and ramp up the 'automatic' to an appropriate level.
I've wanted to try building one myself, but unfortunately even the minimal woodworking required is a bit of a challenge for me.
I was building a DIY filter and took apart a purifier and was disappointed at it not having DC for me to connect my esp to for a sensor to check the purity.
No smarts, means no DRM.
There is a mechanical filter that will be cleanable, but the HEPA filter works by having an injected electrostatic charge which will leak away over time, and the activated carbon will deactivate over time.
It would be interesting to know if there are statistics on how quickly those processes occur, and whether they are affected by volume of air or just elapsed time
Nope, HEPA filters are not dependent on electrostatic effects and do not magically start leaking. When they are too loaded with dust, air has a harder time getting through, which is the main factor that causes them to need replacement.
What's the point of having a warning of the life of the filter if OP ignores it? Why did it say it couldn't filter? If his house is dusty, and he cleaned it there's probably dust that isn't visible, he hacked the drm but he also looked for the "best air filter" and found this instead of a fan with some filters on it with no verification.
You don't just clean a filter and say I KNOW there is 12 months more.
So you'll buy a replacement filter to make the warning go away, a filter you can't (easily) buy from anyone besides the original manufacturer since they DRMed it? Obviously HEPA filters do expire eventually, but there's a perverse incentive here for the warning to undershoot the actual useful life of the filter.
Hypothetically, yes, there's a perverse incentive, but is that what is actually happening?
A clogged filter can stress the fan motor which can A) increase power consumption and B)reduce overall product life.
you got it completely backwards, unless you have a very fancy and expensive ECM motor.
Increasing resistance decreases power draw, as the fan needs to do less work. You can test this by hooking up a vaccum cleaner to a killawatt and blocking the intake.
There may be concerns about cooling the motor, but it really doesn't take that much air movement to dissipate heat.
Most consumers aren't really capable of this type of nuance.
A clogged filter is obviously full of dust and grime, anyone who can use a vacuum cleaner can understand that
Why would anyone do that? Seems like a waste of a hot water heater that probably has a lot of life left.
People that do this probably throw out food the moment it hits the best before date too.
If you want a speaker you don't buy Sonos and say I turned off the drm, firmware and added a headphone jack.
If you want filtered air for cheap you buy a box fan with HEPA.
If someone does their research, and still buys a proprietary system that sells you expensive filters and has drm, AND chooses to get this device they must have a really good reason or aren't very smart.
It's surprising that your device has the reading and it would have been a great read if it was hacked to display the air pressure to gauge the longevity. If it's a different model and you're interested maybe you can flash esphome on it.
We don't know it said that - it could have been saying 'arbitrary number of seconds of use has elapsed/. You could be right, but we don't know.
At least in the older Version 3 that was still the case.
People really need to include the running costs into their calculations. The best deals aren't usually the cheapest machines.
> You don't just clean a filter and say I KNOW there is 12 months more.
You do, I have been using two for about 6 years, and you can easily get at least 3-4× runtime out of authentic filters. I refer to external particulate matter sensors and ignore whatever the purifiers themselves are showing. You can also easily clean the filter with hot water, it removes any smells and has no effect on its purifying performance (again, using a couple of external sensors as reference).
What? What do you call the particles it filters, if not dust?
Of course you can do with a prefilter which filters out larger dust particles so they don't clog your finer filter. But most air purifiers come with that from what I've seen.
Yes, you definitively do.
I am located in a defacto dust free location, but I use an air purifier to keep my pollen allergy under control when spring arives: This shitty DRM is telling me to change filters after X hours, because it ASSUMES it is clogged, even though it has no idea of the reality? No idea if the air is like in New Delhi or like in the north of Sweden?
Hell no! Thank you, but I can decide that on my own.
If you could do that all and still chose to buy the device with drm, locked hours and a proprietary fan with filter there is flawed logic way before you bought the device. Even going forward a box fan and filter is cheaper and better.
My eyes can probably not tell if the filter is over its lifespan, but my pollen allergy definetly can tell if it still works.
Never buy a laser printer or photocopier. They'll tell you the toner needs replacing months before it actually does.
HEPA filter life is a little harder to evaluate using basic human senses.
There's people born every day that don't know anything. Some would rather exploit that rather than facilitate openness and creativity.
it killed a quarter of a billion people
do not recommend
also your claim and source are ridiculous. you can't blame something like a famine on a non-capitalist governance because famines can happen in capitalism just the same
but we know that industrialization generally results in a dramatic increase in life expectancy at birth, not a decrease. not much of a comfort if you're dying of mesothelioma from the combination of smoking (also historically higher in the non-capitalist parts of the industrialized world) and working with asbestos in a factory, which is pretty directly caused by industrialization, but i think it's reasonable to weigh diffuse, probabilistic risks against each other. for example, dying of an infected wound that wasn't treated properly because of inadequate resources, versus dying of an asthma attack aggravated by industrial nitrogen oxide emissions
with respect to famines, my claim and source are extremely thoroughly documented, and it is obviously correct to blame famines on non-democratic governance. there may have been historical famines that were not caused by government oppression, but simply due to population reaching the carrying capacity of the existing arable land with the available farming practices. but that hasn't happened since the advent of capitalism, because agricultural productivity has grown more rapidly than population
consequently there has never been a famine in a country whose economy was organized along capitalist lines (from wikipedia: an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit, whose central characteristics include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price systems, private property, property rights recognition, voluntary exchange, and wage labor)
democratic non-capitalism is certainly possible — i live in a non-capitalist democratic country that is struggling to return to capitalism, and we have never had a famine, though during the dictatorships we came close — but in practice nobody has ever succeeded in 'repealing' capitalism democratically, which is to say, eliminating it through government fiat. here our historical loss of capitalism was accompanied by a historical loss of democracy
if we want to steelman the 'deaths from capitalism' claim, we could focus on access to healthcare, which is generally better under socialist governments than in capitalist systems (though the usa for some reason runs its healthcare under a weird socialism/capitalism hybrid that gives the worst of both worlds). historically, for example, communist cuba had better health than the much richer and more industrialized usa. but other countries with actually capitalist healthcare systems such as switzerland, germany, sweden, and japan always exceeded both, because they were richer than cuba (due to capitalism) and did healthcare worse than cuba but better than the usa (again, due to capitalism). and of course the non-communist alternatives to capitalism, such as corporatism and medieval-style guild production (sadly still dominant in many countries) fare even worse by these measures
still, capitalism does produce obvious shortfalls in healthcare access, and hypothetical alternatives to capitalism that haven't been tried yet could certainly do much better
and some complain about underpopulation
either a bunch of people die or a bunch get poor and either way one half of these complaints goes away
if even the winners of the game want it repealed why not
it could be fun
and it worked for the ussr, with only a loss of a few million lives and the gain of millions
this is also true for china
net gain for communist china in citizens
also please start a site with an rss feed collecting kragen notes releases
semantic kragen-web 2.0
you can git clone http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/pavnotes2.git and run git pull every half hour if you want. a git pull when there are no updates involves two http transactions sending a total of 486 bytes, it's a lot more lightweight than an rss fetch
Breathing air that was cleaned by someone's intellectual property (without a royalty payment and code to ensure their lungs only process it according to the license) is theft. Unless we DRM it, the incentive to clean the air will be gone and nobody will do it!
A glut of complicated smart devices connected to simple electronics such as motors and lights are easily rerouted to another IC.
I have the same unit, except an older one, which doesn't really cause problems (it just displays the 0% for a few seconds when turning on). But the newer models do have this issue.
I basically replace mine once per year even though Xiaomi considers it to have a service life of about 6 months when running 24/7 as it does here. I run it at a pretty low speed because it's too noisy otherwise but they don't seem to take this into account when calculating the lifespan. When the hayfever season starts, I put in a fresh one to get maximum benefit. But it's nice to be able to reset this.
PS: I didn't "see" the tag on my last filter with my phone, I thought it was a different type with a different frequency. Guess I'm wrong.
It's a bit suspicious that older models only showed the warning at power on and they changed it to be more annoying. It's possible that the change was malicious (an intentional dark pattern).
Looks like it is 3 stages ("primary", "high-efficiency", and "activated carbon"). https://www.mi.com/global/product/xiaomi-smart-air-purifier-...
I keep a low-dust apartment, and my 2 Levoit air purifier HEPA filters get changed every 3 months (sooner, if there was an unusual incident). The white of the HEPA material is sometimes visibly gray after 3 months, even though I vacuum the first stage surface every 1-3 weeks.
Obviously they aren't as new, but they still work very well.
Imported Xiaomi filters are annoyingly expensive though
Also, I thought air purifier filters aren't 'cleanable'. Like, you can't just hoover them.
The machine can know if it measures differential pressure across the filter. If the DP across the filter is too high (indicating a clogged filter), the filter needs to be replaced.
A machine could, but is this machine sophisticated enough to do that? Why do we play around with hypotethical scenarious where this warning message on another device might not be shitty DRM?
AFAICT, there were no readily obvious DP sensors to be found.
Edit: prohibited is U+1F6AB So place this over U+1F4A9 That is the logo! Is there a way to specify combinations of characters in unicode?