- cross-posted to:
- homeautomation@selfhosted.forum
- cross-posted to:
- homeautomation@selfhosted.forum
A Verge story on hacking your robot vacuum so it doesn’t phone home.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Giese, a PhD student at Northeastern University, started hacking back in 2017, eventually found a way to root a Xiaomi robot, and wrote a cloud replacement implementation called Dustcloud.
iRobot and Roomba are almost synonymous with robot vacuums at this point; they aren’t ideal for hacking because they lack the processor overhead to run Valetudo.
To hack the robot, I acquired a $5 custom piece of hardware called the Dreame Breakout PCB through the Valetudo Telegram group, where most of the support for the process lives.
We installed the necessary dependencies and software, pried open the top using a couple of small flathead screwdrivers, took the breakout PCB I had soldered, and, per the instructions, plugged it into the 16-pin Dreame Debug connector.
While writing this article, a person on X (formerly Twitter) responded that they discovered they could pipe a voice synthesizer into their robot via SSH, allowing them to screw with their roommates by having it complain about its imprisonment.
It felt like when I was young and when computers were new and fun things before everything became gray sludge and tablets, condescending UI, and endless pages of unreadable, untrustworthy terms of service agreements.
The original article contains 2,075 words, the summary contains 196 words. Saved 91%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is awesome, but a $600 vacuum isn’t
I have hardwood floors and haven’t vacuumed in three years. It can mop, and even the fucking corners are clean, they’re that good now. I’d pay $600 a year to never vacuum again.
Ahh man I really need to get my Vacuum flashed it has been on my list of things to do for a long time. Just haven’t had the time.
I ripped out the wifi chip from my Shark. Vacuum works pretty much the same.
Lmao
I want this for all the cloud polling shit devices i bought like an idiot
If anyone has a similar solution for “hubspace” smart fans, I’m all ears
I’ll just use my normal vacuum
Bro, I just use a broom
you’ve commented this twice in this thread. my roomba does 10 hours of vacuuming a week.
Even if I paid a human with a vacuum (not a broom) to do that they would probably eventually start doing a worse job than the roomba as they got bored with the job.
Silly question but why does a house take 10 hours to vacuum? That seems like a really long time even for a large place.
I just spend some time every weekend cleaning. Even with other basic chores like cleaning my bathroom and dusting it doesn’t take me anywhere near 10 hours
it runs for an hour to an hour and a half every day.
They probably run it more than once a week :)
That’s because a robovac enables you to clean super frequently. The marginal cost of vacuuming and mopping with a robovac is 0, so there’s not much reason not to schedule it to run every day (or night if your model is quiet enough) so you can have spotless floors every day. I set mine to run vacuum and mop at 5am every day so I can wake up to freshly mopped floors. There’s no way I would ever want to put in the required amount of daily cleaning to achieve that if I didn’t have a robovac. The dock empties the bin, washes the mop, and refills the water tank through the laundry room water spigot as well as pumps the dirty mopping water out the washing machine drain tube in the wall so it’s fully automated and I only need to rinse the water filter every couple of weeks and change the docks vacuum bag every 6ish months.
If you don’t have any desire to have floors cleaned daily or to automate that then it makes perfect sense to just do a weekly cleaning like you do, but if you want to have 10 hours of cleaning done weekly then a robovac/mop is great for that.
Idk, I use a $20 roomba from way before corporates realized they can collect crap via a fucking vacuum cleaner and were still kind enough to leave an available UART with well-documented api. A few more bucks spent on a esp8266, a logic level shifter and a dc-dc step-down, and you can integrate it into home assistant. Actually, I also had to 3d-print a few broken parts, but that’s on a case-by-case basis.
Jokes aside, an interesting read; tnx for sharing.
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I have an old Neato robot and I would love to be able to flash some custom firmware on it considering that the company went bankrupt and even when it was working their software support was pretty bad.
Anyone able to find a broom that doesn’t track my sweeps? All the brooms these days are “smart brooms” /s
Just use a broom
