2020-09-19 - re-flashing vacuum cleaner

with my recent complains on provider's cloud concept in mind, let's think what can we do with existing device?

recently i've re-flashed my robot vacuum cleaner, with open source alternative. it now never connects to the above could and i can control it from my local network, via web browser. device is cut off from the internet altogether. the nice thing is that it now work WAY faster and more reliably. also i no longer need to have yet-another-useless-mobile-app on my phone, to press the “clean all” button.

a friend of mine pointed me to the valetudo project. it advertised with: “free your vacuum from the cloud”. LGTM! :D after digging through all the options, i've decided to settle for valetudo's for by rand256, as it offered a couple extra features i was looking for.

the installation went nicely, according to the documentation. the only “tricky part”, was that i had to first restore my vacuum robot to the factory settings. it turned out that newer firmware was actively protecting the robot from non-vendor updates. the process failed w/o any obvious reason – it looked like a connection issue (timeout). aside from this, it all went smoothly and i'm happily using updated firmware for a couple of months now.