Request for more detail

[EricLauber]

I haven't been able to get this working yet. There's some information that's implied or unclear that I'm seeking to get clarified. I am trying to use an MQTT broker add-on in Home Assistant.

1. Do we need to enable anonymous authentication on the broker so that the Levoit 200s can connect?
2. Can you provide a sample broker setup that users can test against?
3. Is "sleep mode" the equivalent of turning the fan off? (on the device it cycles through off, then levels 1, 2, and 3)
4. Are you able to get and set the state of the night light? It can be completely off or one of two different brightness settings (Vesync's cloud integration in HA provides Off/Dim/On).
5. Is it possible to get the state of the filter? (example: 94%)

I think if we can get the state of the purifier's fan, we can wrap the mqtt data to be more user friendly in Home Assistant as a device or template entities (fan, light, etc.)

[loryanstrant]

Looks like the author hasn't come back to you.
Have you had any luck @EricLauber?
I've tried this myself but found it's not so straightforward. I've got a Core 300s.
I've even gone down the path of generating a fake *.vesync.com certificate and creating a dedicated listener on my broker, but fundamentally it rejected the certificate as being from an untrustworthy CA (despite the fact the actual certificate on the real cloud MQTT host is self-signed).

[tezcooling]

I had a go at this with a core 400s and same result, whatever I do my self signed certs are rejected. I guess the 200s must use a less strict certificate policy

[EricLauber]

@loryanstrant and @tezcooling just today I successfully intercepted the 200S and received its status updates. There were some additional steps beyond self signing a cert. I'm going to test publishing to the broker to see if I can control the purifier and will document my steps.

The purifier is connecting to the MQTT port 1883 using MQTTS instead of 8883, so you have to support TLS on the unencrypted port. It also seems to have cached the IP for the VeSync domain so overwriting the DNS entry on my local DNS server wasn't enough, I had to implement NAT rules on the router to masquerade as the VeSync server and respond through the gateway.

EDIT: Publishing to the broker using the commands in this repo work.

I had some trouble configuring Home Assistant's MQTT Broker, so I fired up a docker container with its own. I got the idea from Maveo garage door opener integrations on the Home Assistant forums. My intention is to have this broker act as a bridge to push/pull with HA itself. Gemini helped me figure a lot of this out.

services:
  mosquitto:
    image: eclipse-mosquitto:latest
    container_name: mqtt-bridge
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "1883:1883"
      - "8883:8883"
    volumes:
      - ./config:/mosquitto/config
      - ./certs:/mosquitto/certs
      - ./data:/mosquitto/data
    user: "1883:1883"

# Handles the encrypted traffic hitting 1883 via router redirect
listener 1883
protocol mqtt
allow_anonymous true
certfile /mosquitto/certs/broker.crt
keyfile /mosquitto/certs/broker.key
# don't ask the Purifier for its own cert, it won't have one
require_certificate false

Gemini proposes these additional config entries to forward to HA

connection ha_bridge
address YOUR_HA_IP:1883
remote_username YOUR_HA_USER
remote_password YOUR_HA_PASSWORD
# Forward everything from local 'mqtt/LEVOIT_ID/' to HA 'remote/LEVOIT_ID/'
topic # out 0 mqtt/LEVOIT_ID/ remote/LEVOIT_ID/

Additionally, since the IP was cached and the 200S was not checking for the IP of my local broker, on my router (I currently use pfSense) I had to setup a Port Forward rule and an Outbound rule.

Port Forward (send requests to VeSync's IP to my broker):

• IPv4
• TCP
• Source
  • Address: Levoit source IP
  • Port: any
• Destination
  • Address: 54.45.138.182 (this is the address my Levoit was using to connect to VeSync)
  • Port: 1883
• Redirect
  • Address: My Broker IP
  • Port: 1883
• NAT Reflection: Enable (Pure NAT)

Outbound (make responses from my broker appear to have come through the gateway like VeSync would):

• IPv4
• TCP
• Source
  • Address: Levoit source IP/32
  • Port: empty
• Destination
  • Address: My Broker IP/32
  • Port: 1883
• Translation
  • Address: The interface I was using

The connections to the MQTT broker come in with the IP address of the router/gateway and not the Levoit itself.

[EricLauber]

I haven't quite gotten the yaml in Home Assistant correct just yet, but so far I'm successfully able to:

• read the power state, the night light, display lights, child lock, and filter
• set the fan speed to high, medium, low, and turn it completely off.

I need to tweak the syntax to match the sample commands to trigger the lights and lock, and then properly show the selected fan speed in the card.