…then proceeded to get stoned and watch it roam the house, doing it’s thing.
And then it dawned on me - I now have a completely self-contained autonomous robot that is free to roam my house, not attached to any cloud services, doing actually productive things; and I have full control over it.
I know it’s an odd thing for a grown-ass man to get excited over, but I can attest to the fact that 14 year-old me would be over the fucking moon about this. My parents got me the first Lego Mindstorms set for Christmas when I was younger, and I had an old Palm V handheld from my uncle; I managed to figure out how to control the Mindstorms controller with the Palm V’s built-in IR blaster, using just a “universal remote” app.
How far we’ve come… Just accomplishing this has given me a renowned motivation for self-hosting shit; it’s incredibly freeing. And knowing that the manufacturer of this vacuum could access it at any point and just outright shut it off without my knowledge… I don’t have to deal with that anymore.
The robot is a Wyze “Robot Vacuum” (model WVCR200S), which is based on the 3irobotix CRL-200S - the very same robot one author recently discovered was being intentionally shut off after he had blocked some telemetry URLs. I bought it for $20 on eBay. Fully functional, but the battery only lasted ~10 minutes from a full charge. Luckily it just uses four 18650 cells in series, so replacing those was a pretty simple task. I did not buy a whole new pack (most of them are expensive and falsify their true capacities), rather opting for individual Molicel P30B 3000mAh cells for ~$5 each. I ended up having to peel off the nickel tabs from the old cells and carefully solder them to the new cells, as I don’t have a spot welder. Lots of flux and a soldering iron set to 450C were key here. I would not recommend that method 😅.
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I’ve patiently waited until the flashing guide for the roborock s8 was out, went to buy the s8 pro ultra, just to discover valetudo has dropped the support, because appearently a different version of the same robot was silently released, that would’ve been turned into a brick if I tried the installation procedure.
Now I have a dumb robot. It does like 95% of what I expect it to do, but I might at least solder an ep32 to the top buttons so that scheduling through the home assistant would be possible
Yeah, that’s a rough one. Manufacturers really don’t want us mucking about and will release different versions under the same name all to obfuscate that process.
A lot of TVs are like this as well; we have a curved Samsung 55" that lost it’s backlight last year - not only did I need the model and serial numbers, I also needed the specific T-con board revision. A similar thing happened on my former TCL Roku TV several years before. Same deal.
And then it dawned on me - I now have a completely autonomous robot roaming my house, not attached to any cloud services
I have one of the older model rumba’s. It does have wifi capabilities, but I’ve never connected it. Do the newer models require you to connect to wifi? Valetudo looks interesting tho.
Responded with the wrong account… I try not to have any crossover between my accounts, but here we are…
Anyway.
Do the newer models require you to connect to wifi?
Probably. I only have the two robots: the aforementioned Wyze, and a cheap Eufy Robovac 25C
Valetudo looks interesting tho.
It’s really quite fascinating. Valetudo is not a 3rd party firmware - it’s a cloud replacement that’s hosted on the robot itself, and also runs a webserver which gives you access to the actual controls and relevant firmware options.
Valetudo is not a 3rd party firmware - it’s a cloud replacement that’s hosted on the robot itself, and also runs a webserver which gives you access to the actual controls and relevant firmware options.
Yeah but can it run Doom? That’s the burning question
Well these robots run a Linux distribution as a base. So yes, sure, they will run doom just fine.
If you can manage to get video out, I’m sure it can be done. Maybe you can even stream Doom to a web browser.
I’m honestly not entirely sure. I’ve been eyeballing Valetudo for a few years now, but the price of the supported robots was out of my budget until I happened onto the $20 Wyze from eBay. Took a chance and won big. I’m into it a whopping $65. And a bit of labor to swap the motherboard (mine refused to run ADB at all). But that’s the fun part for me.
Still sounds easier than getting my roborock on valetudo. I had to take the entire thing apart to get to the other side of the mobo to flash the thing. Felt like I needed 3 hands to ground one place while doing a bunch of other things just to get it to flash. My workspace was a mess of screws and tiny robot parts I only half remembered taking out.
In the end it worked and I’m very happy with it. Was sweating for a bit though. It was a $400 vacuum iirc.
Worth it IMO. These things get hella filthy inside. I took mine apart to replace its motherboard, and I’m glad I did because it needed a good cleaning.
These things get hella filthy inside.
LOL Reminds me of when my Jack Russel was a pup, training him to poop outside. Well, one day early in his training, he decided to poop under the dinning room table and I didn’t see it. Turned the vaccum loose, and sure enough, it found the poop, smeared it all over the floors and made a complete mess of the guts. I spent the day with a toothbrush and some cleaner. So, yeah…can confirm they do get filthy.
Of you ever feel like you can’t find the right screws or it just doesn’t hold back together well, just Goop the bastard back together.
So much stuff in my life is now Gooped together - I even Gooped some drives into a desktop that lacked enough mount points.
That stuff is magic in a tube.
~/copypasta/gunfortheprinter.odt but it’s a JTAG header for the vacuum
