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Comment by dharma1 | Hacker News Reader

I've had the Xiaomi one for a couple of years, the one with lidar. It's great. Used to love watching the app as the little guy gets to work and the map starts building realtime.

It runs Ubuntu, you can root it. And even get spotify running on it.

https://github.com/dgiese/dustcloud

https://medium.com/@anxodio/how-to-get-spotify-working-on-yo...

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> you can root it. And even get spotify running on it

Some might ask why you'd want Spotify on your vacuum? I would have it play Dolly Parton's "(Working) 9 to 5" on loop whenever it's running. I feel like that would be hilarious forever. Other suggestions welcome.

Kraftwerk – We Are the Robots

Dan Mangan - Robots ~ "Robots need love too..."

I like the one where the guy made the vacuum scream every time it ran into something

You talk like you've never heard of DJ Roomba.

Is rooting it worth it? I have one but I haven't bothered with rooting it yet. It would be worth it if I could start-stop it locally, as the app has to go through China and the latency is ~2 seconds, which is terrible.

You don't even need to root it.

Most Xiaomi smart-devices speak a protocol called miIO. There are several libraries/bindings for your favorite languages/tools as well as a nice CLI tool[0].

The only tricky part is getting the device token[1]. But once you have that it's smooth sailing.

[0] https://python-miio.readthedocs.io/en/latest/vacuum.html [1] https://python-miio.readthedocs.io/en/latest/discovery.html#...

Oh I had set that up and then forgot about it, I'll give it another shot. Thanks!

Oh wow I had no idea this was all out there. Thanks :)

I've recently got a Xiaomi one myself. Will look into these ressources, thanks.

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