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Comment by elric | Hacker News Reader

I was rather happy with my old, dumb Roomba. It just bounced around until things were clean. No cloud required. No mapping. No AI marketing foo. Seems like all the newer alternatives want internet access and send maps of your premises to some cloud somewhere. Seems completely unnecessary to me.

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Roomba couldn’t remember map, so when you wanted to clean part of the apartment you had to build barriers or just walk with it. It also got lost way too many times.

As for the Chinese products - look at Valetudo. If you write about cloud and privacy considerations then you are already aware enough to just flash it and you have local, cloud-free, GREAT product.

Any pointer on how to flash it?

Check Valetudo's getting started page.

Go to the website, it has step by step guide for the supported robots: https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/supported-robots.html

I still have one like that, and it runs mostly fine, but is partly held together by duct tape these days. Not replacing it as long as I can keep it running.

Especially considering that story some year ago about photos taken by Roombas that had been uploaded to the cloud and leaked.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i...

Mapping is very useful. I get the want to safeguard your data, but having smart navigation and obstacle detection just makes the product better.

Are you implying that internet access is required in order to have "smart nagivation" and obstacle detection? If so, could you clarify what you think the connection is?

No, I'm implying mapping is useful. I'm certain you can have local only mapping. But OP seemed to put the mapping as well as the rest of the features in the "unnecessary" bucket and my problem is that I consider mapping super necessy.

Ok, I see. I think that you're right.

Maybe mapping is very useful to you. The lack of it hasn't bothered me in the slightest. You also don't need mapping (or internet access) for obstacle detection. But I find that the old dumb roomba's bumpy nature is a good motivator to keep my place somewhat free of obstacles, which has other benefits.

YMMV.

I like being able to tap my phone a couple times and tell it to clean out e.g. the area around my cat's toilet, or my kitchen floor after I spill something, etc...

You can still find ones that don't need to be registered online and will work without WLAN or app. They will not remember the room layouts and you won't be able to lay virtual fences, but apart from that they work fine.

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