The best robot vacuum for me is the one I hacked
www.theverge.com
Be free, my little vacuum monster.

A Verge story on hacking your robot vacuum so it doesn’t phone home.

  • Catsrules@lemmy.ml
    5·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • Artyom@lemm.ee
    4·
    2 years ago

    I ripped out the wifi chip from my Shark. Vacuum works pretty much the same.

  • fl42v@lemmy.ml
    3·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • archomrade [he/him]@midwest.socialEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    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

    • muusemuuse@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      I’m actually looking into this now with some hubspace lights I have. They seem to have disabled flashing from the bootloader so the only way to do this is with signed updates from the manufacturer. But I dont like the cloud-only method of control hubspace uses so it looks like…desoldering the original ESP32 and putting on another one thats been flashed with ravencore, ESPhome, WLED, or tasmota is what I’ll have to do.

      • archomrade [he/him]@midwest.socialEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        yup. I haven’t done it yet, but apparently ceiling fan controllers are a pretty standard thing, so usually all you really have to do is replace the whole controller box (they’re like $30 apiece from what I remember), or replace the controller board itself like you mentioned.

        I’ve stopped buying appliances from places like Home Depot for this reason, seems like they simply do not stock items that aren’t their brand-name cloud-hosted services, or larger brands like hue.

  • filister@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 years ago

    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.