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Comment by simpaticoder | Hacker News Reader

When the iRobot servers go down, it will be a brick, so now is the time to reverse the protocols and figure out how to control it over the local subnet. Besides, there is no justification for connecting it to the public internet, which is an unnecessary DOS risk and moderate privacy risk. I buy no hardware that requires a persistent service to function. I made an exception for this, and now must pay the hackers price.

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If you really want zero network theres always Valetudo, https://valetudo.cloud/

But most of the vacuums want internet access for setup, but then work completely fine being blocked from the internet after.

I can't be sure about the latest models, but my two iRobot products - a Roomba 650 and a Braava 380t - don't have Wi-Fi connectivity to begin with.

The Roomba has physical buttons on it, which allow you to set a cleaning schedule if you so choose. There's also a small LED display, and a speaker that "says" what's wrong.

The Braava, by contrast, is a dumb-as-bricks device with two buttons - "mop" (which uses mop-like motions) and "sweep" (which uses broom-like motions).

Do they bump into stuff? Yep. Do I call them "dumbass" as I watch them clean? Sure do. But they're otherwise perfectly capable little single-function devices that don't try to do anything more than they really need to do.

What are the odds you can even do that without extensive hardware modifications? If they have hardcoded URLs for the API and the certificates for that, how would you intercept that?

Without rewriting the storage in the robot itself, which would be hard for most people.

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