A Verge story on hacking your robot vacuum so it doesn’t phone home.
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At certain points – and I think needing to flash a third-party firmware into your robot vacuum to safeguard your privacy is one of those moments – you really need to ask whether this shit is worth it.
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.
My stance is to just not own one of the fucking things. There’s your harm elimination. There is no data collected for me to protect.
How about your car?
Intentionally about 20 years old and no connectivity.
What happens in 20 years when you need a new car and all of them have connectivity, even the oldest second hand ones?
I’m trying to make the best choices I can right now. In 20 years, assuming I’m still alive, I’ll try to make the best choices available to me then – which will probably be to still drive a car from circa Y2K. Cars don’t just turn to dust after 40 years. People today are absolutely horny for cars from the 50s and 60s.
Fair point
‘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!
I wanted this person to clarify their statement, how is asking for information a bad thing?
Then allow me to clarify:
jesus CHRIST just buy an upright you ASSHOLES
my upright vacuum has a motor that could vacuum up a whole roomba. it doesn’t need to charge. it has a hepa filter so good it outperforms my actual, dedicated air purifier. it doesn’t send my floor plan and activity schedule to amazon. it doesn’t take and send dick pics of me to the CIA. it can’t talk to other devices in my house and form some weird spy mesh network. it needs to be run rarely enough that i have never felt burdened by it.
in conclusion fuck your stupid, stupid IOT dustbuster on wheels
There might have been some miscommunication between us. I fully support the fight for privacy and buy nothing that’s not truly under my control. I do not have a vacuum robot, I run Linux on all my computers, GrapheneOS on my phone, the only ‘smart’ thing about my car is its ability to detect when it’s dark so it can turn on my headlights, that sort of thing. But I don’t know you and your original comment didn’t make it clear to me whether you engaged in defeatist speech or were advocating for privacy.
I’m using “your” as a non-specific adjective. I could have written “fuck one’s roomba” I suppose but that doesn’t sound right at all.
You sound jealous.
It’s surprising how much dust my robot picks up every day. It’s very nice
Couldn’t you just make it so it’s not connected to the internet?
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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!
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.
Valetudo’s list of supported robots is basically an exhaustive list of the robot vacuums worth buying.
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.
Gotta create your own OS. Could call it, like… TempleOS.
Could I interest you in driving a drill into an IC to disable DRM on a console?
Is this what robot lobotomy looks like?
This is awesome, but a $600 vacuum isn’t
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.
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.
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
I ripped out the wifi chip from my Shark. Vacuum works pretty much the same.
Lmao
I’ll just use my normal vacuum
Bro, I just use a broom
you’ve commented this twice in this thread. my roomba does 10 hours of vacuuming a week.
Even if I paid a human with a vacuum (not a broom) to do that they would probably eventually start doing a worse job than the roomba as they got bored with the job.
Silly question but why does a house take 10 hours to vacuum? That seems like a really long time even for a large place.
I just spend some time every weekend cleaning. Even with other basic chores like cleaning my bathroom and dusting it doesn’t take me anywhere near 10 hours
What a robot vacuum affords you is zero-effort cleaning, meaning that you can practically just have it run every day. Which I do. Our home was far dustier before, when vacuuming was an effortful activity.
it runs for an hour to an hour and a half every day.
That’s because a robovac enables you to clean super frequently. The marginal cost of vacuuming and mopping with a robovac is 0, so there’s not much reason not to schedule it to run every day (or night if your model is quiet enough) so you can have spotless floors every day. I set mine to run vacuum and mop at 5am every day so I can wake up to freshly mopped floors. There’s no way I would ever want to put in the required amount of daily cleaning to achieve that if I didn’t have a robovac. The dock empties the bin, washes the mop, and refills the water tank through the laundry room water spigot as well as pumps the dirty mopping water out the washing machine drain tube in the wall so it’s fully automated and I only need to rinse the water filter every couple of weeks and change the docks vacuum bag every 6ish months.
If you don’t have any desire to have floors cleaned daily or to automate that then it makes perfect sense to just do a weekly cleaning like you do, but if you want to have 10 hours of cleaning done weekly then a robovac/mop is great for that.
They probably run it more than once a week :)
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.
Anyone able to find a broom that doesn’t track my sweeps? All the brooms these days are “smart brooms” /s
My vacuum cleaner has more cameras than my phone.
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.
Just use a broom
