Free Your Vacuum from the Cloud | Hacker News Reader

Free Your Vacuum from the Cloud

github.com

19 pointsCroftengea6 comments

Nice to see they’ve made some great progress on the application side, had seen the firmware component years ago. I simply just reach under my cabinet and press the start button on my 1st gen Xiaomi vacuum but looks like it’s time to flash it. It’s crazy to see how xiaomi got it right with lidar from the beginning. I’ve looked for upgrades over the years and the cost effective variants have all been incremental upgrades in firmware and performance or just straight downgrades with things like mopping.

If anyone is interested in these things mine has been great for 5 years now and would recommend a lidar based one at a minimum. Got a Wyze for my now wife on sale for $75 (a steal) 1-2 years ago and it’s a cost reduced update of mine but performs just as well as mine and I think may use US servers (being a US company?)

Hopefully it'll support my vacuum cleaner soon.

The biggest problem to me is that some of the rooting requires opening the decide, depending on the model you might be disassembling a lot.

It's scary when these things cost 300-500 dollars.

I really wish device manufacturers made it easier for people to be able to change the firmware of the devices they've purchased.

When you were first purchasing your unit did you do much research into its privacy policy/rooting support or offline support?

I bought specifically off Valetudos list of supported models. But didn't get around to make the needed breakout board yet.

I bought my first unit maybe 5 years ago, I didn't know such a thing as valetudo existed. After I found out, although my unit was supported the process was quite involved so I never did it.

A few weeks ago I bought another unit, it's not supported by valetudo yet but the previous model was. So my thought was that soon enough this new will be supported as well; they don't really seem to be super different when it comes to features (though there were some features I needed, which is why I got the new model instead of the older one).

At this point, I am willing to sacrifice privacy for the cleaning.

For Dreame vacuums, you need this to flash Valetudo to the vacuum without compromising warranty seals: https://github.com/Hypfer/valetudo-dreameadapter

Sorry, but that's more work than I'm willing to do to prevent the vacuum from hitting CN servers.

I would rather see our government (US) do more to enforce data privacy laws.

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