Hacking your robot vacuum
Hacking your robot vacuum
www.theverge.com
The best robot vacuum for me is the one I hacked
A Verge story on hacking your robot vacuum so it doesn't phone home.
37 comments
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Giese, a PhD student at Northeastern University, started hacking back in 2017, eventually found a way to root a Xiaomi robot, and wrote a cloud replacement implementation called Dustcloud.
iRobot and Roomba are almost synonymous with robot vacuums at this point; they aren’t ideal for hacking because they lack the processor overhead to run Valetudo.
To hack the robot, I acquired a $5 custom piece of hardware called the Dreame Breakout PCB through the Valetudo Telegram group, where most of the support for the process lives.
We installed the necessary dependencies and software, pried open the top using a couple of small flathead screwdrivers, took the breakout PCB I had soldered, and, per the instructions, plugged it into the 16-pin Dreame Debug connector.
While writing this article, a person on X (formerly Twitter) responded that they discovered they could pipe a voice synthesizer into their robot via SSH, allowing them to screw with their roommates by having it complain about its imprisonment.
It felt like when I was young and when computers were new and fun things before everything became gray sludge and tablets, condescending UI, and endless pages of unreadable, untrustworthy terms of service agreements.
The original article contains 2,075 words, the summary contains 196 words. Saved 91%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
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I got myself a Dreametech L10 Pro and put Valetudo (mentioned in the article) on it. I absolutely love it! It goes on sale often.
The cloud server is actively developed.
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Valetudo's list of supported robots is basically an exhaustive list of the robot vacuums worth buying.
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I've been browsing valetudo, I was a bit surprised that almost all installations are rated to some degree "easy", even though many devices require things that are not at all accessible such as assembling and soldering your circuit board; I don't want to know what a device rated as difficult would be like.
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Could I interest you in driving a drill into an IC to disable DRM on a console?
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Is this what robot lobotomy looks like?
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Gotta create your own OS. Could call it, like… TempleOS.
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This is awesome, but a $600 vacuum isn’t
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I have hardwood floors and haven't vacuumed in three years. It can mop, and even the fucking corners are clean, they're that good now. I'd pay $600 a year to never vacuum again.
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I want this for all the cloud polling shit devices i bought like an idiot
If anyone has a similar solution for "hubspace" smart fans, I'm all ears
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I'm actually looking into this now with some hubspace lights I have. They seem to have disabled flashing from the bootloader so the only way to do this is with signed updates from the manufacturer. But I dont like the cloud-only method of control hubspace uses so it looks like.....desoldering the original ESP32 and putting on another one thats been flashed with ravencore, ESPhome, WLED, or tasmota is what I'll have to do.
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yup. I haven't done it yet, but apparently ceiling fan controllers are a pretty standard thing, so usually all you really have to do is replace the whole controller box (they're like $30 apiece from what I remember), or replace the controller board itself like you mentioned.
I've stopped buying appliances from places like Home Depot for this reason, seems like they simply do not stock items that aren't their brand-name cloud-hosted services, or larger brands like hue.
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I ripped out the wifi chip from my Shark. Vacuum works pretty much the same.
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Lmao
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Ahh man I really need to get my Vacuum flashed it has been on my list of things to do for a long time. Just haven't had the time.
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I'll just use my normal vacuum
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Idk, I use a $20 roomba from way before corporates realized they can collect crap via a fucking vacuum cleaner and were still kind enough to leave an available UART with well-documented api. A few more bucks spent on a esp8266, a logic level shifter and a dc-dc step-down, and you can integrate it into home assistant. Actually, I also had to 3d-print a few broken parts, but that's on a case-by-case basis.
Jokes aside, an interesting read; tnx for sharing.
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Anyone able to find a broom that doesn't track my sweeps? All the brooms these days are "smart brooms" /s
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I have an old Neato robot and I would love to be able to flash some custom firmware on it considering that the company went bankrupt and even when it was working their software support was pretty bad.
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Just use a broom
37 comments
You're not wrong. At a certain point it becomes exhausting. However please don't lose sight of the fact that this is exactly what company's want. They want us to give up all of our data because it's too inconvenient to be upset about it.
So yes, there is likely a line drawn for when having to flash all your devices with custom firmware becomes not worth it for the individual, however the amount of data that gets collected from "smart" devices is absolutely fucking disgusting and we desperately need actual comprehensive data privacy laws.
I'd say it's about harm reduction at this point rather than harm elimination. Do what you reasonably can to protect your privacy but don't let your mental health suffer because you're paranoid that someone is going to hack your robot vacuum.
'This shit' referring to the vacuum or your privacy?
Asking this question on a privacy community really doesn't look good on you.
We shouldn't have to go to these extremes to protect ourselves... But at the same time if we don't do this and defend our rights to do so...there will be attempts to legislate against it and make modifying your tech to protect your privacy illegal!
Couldn't you just make it so it's not connected to the internet?