I bought an air filter 6 years ago and it’s finally on its last legs, so I guess it’s served me well. But well isn’t good enough.
Over the past few months the capacitive buttons have become less and less responsive and for the past month it’s been pretty much dead. So do I replace it? Call Levoit Support? Breathe in the natural brake dust saturated LA air? The options are overwhelming!
Besides the not working part, I didn’t really want a new one- so let’s break it open.
Honestly at first it wasn’t too bad. Couple of screws here and there, bit of tension to break the clips that aren’t supposed to break, and we’re in! So interestingly there were only 3 cables going to the control board from the power supply (which also connects to the motor directly). First thought was some sort of I2C control? Didn’t excite me but let’s keep investigating. How do we get to this control board. I’ll skip the details because the answer is with a drill and enough tension to cause irreparable harm (with a sprinkle of apathy since it was about to become e-waste anyways)
Try to squeeze life out of the control board by bridging the sensor inputs with anything, nothing works. Yank it out and what do we see labeled by that cable to the power supply??! 5V, GND & PWM- hmmmmm.
So hypothetically we can bridge the 5V and PWM and finally breathe crisp carbon filtered air again? Oh yes we can. A quick trip to the local eBay checkout page and a potentiometer shows up in the mail. Now that we have speed control again, let’s throw it on a remote controlled Ikea Tradfri outlet and walk away with an upgraded air filter! I can finally turn it on/off from bed- the dream.
Now we could do something fancier with the PWM input like install an actual remote or throw on a Raspberry Pi, link it to homebridge, have it turn on any time the stove is running or the toilet flushes- all very practical needs. But this is good enough.