Companies should be forced to hand over the communication and operation specification of their IoT devices as soon as they meaningfully degrade the quality or functionality of a cloud service. This will restore trust in the ecosystem, avoid ewaste, and nourish a community of developers/hackers/geeks/users.
A great opportunity to bring up that a robot that operates 100% locally and is located within Bluetooth range has never needed a cloud account, has never had to become unavailable whenever AWS goes down, and certainly doesn't have to be reduced to a manual dud when its company ceases to exist. I wonder what whoever produced such "Systems Design" would have to say to customers now.
Neato made a line of (good) vacuum robots with Lidar.
It seems there were bought by a company called Vorwerk, and Vorwerk are shutting down the cloud infra.
This means the app, floor plans, schedules, no-go zones etc will no longer work. The robot can only be manually started by pushing the button on the device.
As an owner of one of these robots this is sad but not unexpected for anything relying on an app.
By submitting to HN, I’m hopeful someone can point me in the direction of open firmware or OSS projects that can help me restore the lost functionality.
I currently not expect a existing project, but the communication with the server is mostly xml, with the app too. It's a relatively easy protocol and the robot has more or less no protection against changing the software and some security bugs to own it without opening the case.
Vorwerk is the company who makes Themromix - that is a quite expensive cooking robot
. They also are a MLM sales company albeit with a decently appealing product. I expect in a couple of months to get calls to get free cleaning demos. I guess they will have a turf war with the Kirby people.
> Please note that this list is exhaustive. These are the supported robots.
Robots not on this list are not supported by Valetudo. If your robot is not on this list, it is not supported.
From what i gathered so far, Valetudo is actually no custom firmware but modified vendor firmware? So, not sure if anyone related to the project has any interest and capability to reverse that...
Perhaps one day some jurisdiction will have the wherewithal to implement legislation to stop this madness. At the very least all the device and protocol documentation and crypto keys etc should be escrowed somewhere for the day this happens.
What would help just as much: people actually giving a fcuk - as in: researching how durable something is, how hackable, how cloud-dependant or not...
...and not act all surprised when something stops working once the manufacturer calling it quits (or starts charging for a previously-free service).
Today, whenever i talk to others how i evaluate products i still get blank stares and i might as well have talked in a foreign tongue.
Also not happening: learning from $companys previous behaviour - stopped supporting something after a year? No parts, no schematics, no nothing?
Well - welcome to my shitlist of companies that'll never see another $/€ from me, ever again.
Doing this eventually would force companies to change their ways, but as long as they can continue selling whatever dreck they come up with to the masses...
It seems there were bought by a company called Vorwerk, and Vorwerk are shutting down the cloud infra.
This means the app, floor plans, schedules, no-go zones etc will no longer work. The robot can only be manually started by pushing the button on the device.
As an owner of one of these robots this is sad but not unexpected for anything relying on an app.
By submitting to HN, I’m hopeful someone can point me in the direction of open firmware or OSS projects that can help me restore the lost functionality.
> Please note that this list is exhaustive. These are the supported robots. Robots not on this list are not supported by Valetudo. If your robot is not on this list, it is not supported.
From what i gathered so far, Valetudo is actually no custom firmware but modified vendor firmware? So, not sure if anyone related to the project has any interest and capability to reverse that...
What would help just as much: people actually giving a fcuk - as in: researching how durable something is, how hackable, how cloud-dependant or not...
...and not act all surprised when something stops working once the manufacturer calling it quits (or starts charging for a previously-free service).
Today, whenever i talk to others how i evaluate products i still get blank stares and i might as well have talked in a foreign tongue.
Also not happening: learning from $companys previous behaviour - stopped supporting something after a year? No parts, no schematics, no nothing?
Well - welcome to my shitlist of companies that'll never see another $/€ from me, ever again.
Doing this eventually would force companies to change their ways, but as long as they can continue selling whatever dreck they come up with to the masses...
Your title is wrong
Almost all functionality is being disabled, other than limited manual operation.