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Comment by darknavi | Hacker News Reader

I'll be the one to plug Valetudo in this thread I guess. Primitively, it replaces the cloud functionality on-device for robot vacuums (see supported models) and replaces it with local services that run offline and can connect to Home Assistant easily.

I will never buy another robot vacuum without Valetudo support as long as that project lives. It's great.

https://valetudo.cloud/

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I've been eyeing Valetudo for a while. I think it's a shame that it doesn't and (according to the author) never will support multiple maps. I don't want to have to buy a separate robot for each floor when I can easily carry it to the next floor when it's done.

Some robots support restoring map snapshots. I wonder what's stopping people from using this as a multi floor implementation?

I use a fork [1] of Valetudo and it lets me do just this. I save one map per floor, then restore when carrying it between floors. One floor gets cleaned much more often, but so far I have preferred this over buying two robots.

[1] https://github.com/rand256/valetudo

Currently I can just get the robot from one floor to the next and press start. It takes a few seconds to find its bearings and switch maps, then goes on his merry way.

Having to restore a snapshot each time I move floors is a lot more friction.

Yeah the author is very set on his ways. I was thinking about contributing but he doesn't want any help. I read CONTRIBUTING.md and I kind of get it. Respect.

Mad respect indeed. I am not in the target audience for this project, but I just read through the contributing.md page. It is very well written, everything he says makes sense

If there's an issue that affects 3% of users doing something arcane which can be fixed by either a large chunk of code or just by not doing that arcane thing, the latter will be the preferred solution.

Yeah I really didn't mean it as criticism but rather as a reason why I'm in 2 minds about adopting it.

This morning I ran out of coffee at home. While walking to the coffee shop I was thinking about building something like this for my Roborock. Now that I know it already exists, it is a less appealing idea. Video games and books in the holidays it is then!

Are preflashed Valetudo vacuums a thing? It would absolutely be worth it to me to buy setup and working units.

If it can be done quickly enough that ya only need to charge 20 or 30 bucks, it might be a business model to reflash gizmos like this ?

You mean exploiting FOSS for personal profit would be a business model?

Yes, yes most definitely it would be.

We see that all the time in the world. Extract money with the easy tasks and leave the hard stuff (actually building things, long-term support, you name it) to "someone else". And it's perfectly legal too; Just a shameful thing to do.

privatize profits, socialize costs

Um, what?

It's perfectly fine to make a business implementing, installing, or supporting FOSS software. I would even consider that a positive thing. Even if you don't (or can't!) help the upstream development.

What even is this take?

I want to use something Valetudo to keep my local system supportable and maintainable, but I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars trying to figure out which robot vacuum might have just the right firmware revision that I can dismantle and flash it so it'll work.

Given the cost of getting it wrong, buying a preflashed "definitely works" unit is of considerable value to me.

If the author of Valetudo wanted to license a run of vacuums from a manufacturer that definitely worked, I would buy that. If someone else goes into business managing the buying and flashing part with some sort of support, that's also valuable to me.

If this market segment is currently unserved (seems to be) then I'll become a customer of whoever starts serving it, because that has value to me. Ideally, that would also include kicking back funding to ensure good support from the Valetudo platform (which tends to be how these things work).

Though also frankly the idea that managing the logistics and supply of a product pipeline is "easy" is...well, why hardware is hard has been covered extensively before.

Yeah I almost installed it, ripped apart my vacuum, just to realize there are many different roborock S7 versions with different SoCs, and my variant wasn't supported. Also roborock doesn't even support scheduled cleaning without cloud :(

Yeah, I have a Roborock S7 MaxV I bought about two years ago and was hoping I could put open source firmware on it but after some searching I learned that Roborock makes a lot of similar but different flavors within a generation like S7 and they can be quite different. Unfortunately, it appears my MaxV flavor of the S7 isn't rootable.

For those interested: This Reddit post had more info https://www.reddit.com/r/Roborock/comments/vlvep2/roborock_s... and a sub-post there linked to this Defcon presentation on rooting Roborock vacs https://dontvacuum.me/talks/DEFCON29/DEFCON29-vacuum-robots.....

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