A Verge story on hacking your robot vacuum so it doesn’t phone home.

    • FeelzGoodMan420@eviltoast.org
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Melody Fwygon@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        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!

            • ichbinjasokreativ@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              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.

            • Evotech@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              You sound jealous.

              It’s surprising how much dust my robot picks up every day. It’s very nice

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    1 year ago

    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!

    • Tikiporch@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • archomrade [he/him]@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    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

  • Catsrules@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • Artyom@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I ripped out the wifi chip from my Shark. Vacuum works pretty much the same.

      • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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          1 year ago

          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

          • GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            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.

          • Stephen304@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            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.

  • fl42v@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • library_napper@monyet.cc
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    1 year ago

    Anyone able to find a broom that doesn’t track my sweeps? All the brooms these days are “smart brooms” /s

  • filister@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.