Just bought one and got it in today. They have revised the main board on this vacuum and it is no longer rootable. Just a PSA for anyone following along at home.
That's annoying! I was actually considering getting another for upstairs, will need to find an alternative model! Thanks for letting me know, I'll pin your comment for others to see
@@camerongray1515 It seems this is a pretty recent development, just posted on Valetudo. Maybe the new rev will be rootable in the future but all the Information I can find is the update on Valetudo (dated today) and Reddit thread from a few months ago where the poster ended up ordering a replacement main board and got the old board to transplant in.
The reason for those flash backups was in my head while writing that section but apparently never made it out of there into the text. These two flash partitions contain the factory calibration and identity data which is unique for each robot and can't be recovered without a backup if data loss should ever occur. Good catch, thanks!
I run three roborock s6 units with valetudo and feel spoiled. Wonderful local control and excellent software. I have mine saying "get out of my way" when the bumper hits anything. 😂
I'm glad Valetudo is getting some air time. For folks who have access to Dreame robot vacuums, they are *far* easier to hack as full disassembly is *not* required.
My head was still above ground after I recently fell into the home automation rabbit hole. Looks like that's about to change! The folks in my house are going to wake up one day and wonder why all the lights are flashing and all the speakers are saying "help me!" No, there's not a ghost living in my Home Assistant instance. The vacuum cleaner just fell down the stairs and is flailing around like an inverted turtle. Edit: but seriously, this is awesome. I've been subscribed to you for a while and you always show the coolest stuff.
Tip when removing screws: it’s easier to track them if you use some masking or packing tape, fold it over on itself to make it double sided, stick it to the part and stick the screw heads to the tape.
Great Video... I was thinking of getting this Robot and was literally on Amazon when you posted this up. Amazing what you have done with it but my goodness what a teardown that is required!
I remember someone once tried to persuade me to fully switch to Linux (I do use Linux on some devices, but I don’t use it on my main computer, or my x86 based tablet, and I don’t use Linux on the ARM laptop either (out of fear of bricking it, as I cannot obtain factory restore media for it)) (For those wondering, the x86 based tablet and the ARM laptop both run Windows 11, both devices came with that OS from the factory, the only recovery media for the ARM laptop is a recovery partition provided by the OEM that is non bootable) They also tried persuading me to get my entire family to switch to Linux
I have just done this with the same vacuum! Wish I had found this video beforehand, the teardown would have been a huge help. I actually bricked mine the first time around (kept getting "error 14" at boot) and had to order a replacement mainboard from Aliexpress. Currently trying to get it connected to home assistant which shouldn't be too difficult hopefully.
I did not know there was open source FW for my Roborock. Thanks for the video “not” suggesting it.. 😅 I should try this on my old S5, I’ve always felt somewhat uneasy about it being in the cloud and not only local.
This looks difficult but worth it! I have a roborock S5 max so I will have to do FEL rooting as well... at least I got a good 2 years out of my cleaner. We'll see if I brick it or not, although the dissasembly might be a bit different this video is very good :)
Linnox is on everything. Probably because it's open source and can run on extremely crappy hardware. I think that anything that needs to do any complex computing within the constraints of not so great hardware probably runs a flavor of Linnox on it. Robotic vacuums, smart home hubs, some ATM machines cash registers, although some stuff does run a flavor of windows if it has a screen.
If you think about it, it has to be running some sort of operating system realistically due to the complexity of the software etc and the number of pieces of hardware involved. And it’s not going to be running Windows or macOS, and Linux is much easier for random robotic cleaning companies to build software on top of than some exotic embedded OS.
@@tramcrazy that's what I'm saying. You have to actually run programs on the device. Maybe the most basic robots use ESP 32 devices, but even then you are stretching the limits of those devices.
Do you think theres any value to making the test point and a ground pad accessible wihout having to completely disassemble it again ? Should hopefully not need back into FEL mode but would only take a minute or two more to run a few wires to somewhere a little more convenient.
@@jordanasrukas4880Because in the default state the robot talks to the manufacturer's Chinese server the whole time while working. Some people don't want that to happen because it's not necessary for its functionality. So the question is: Why does the manufacturer force it then?!
That was amazing. Not sure I'd have the nerve to do that with a newly purchased device though. But it might be worth it just to run htop on my vaccum.😀 Were you tempted to try any other Linux stuff on it?
Thanks for an amazing tutorial, i've been wanting to do this for a while so appreciate you walking us through it. What was the name of the wall mounted touch panel, I didn't quite make it out. Cheers
Thanks for the great and informative video! However I'm going crazy trying to get the Mqtt connection working. I've filled in the host, port, and credentials, but according to mqtt logs in HA, an unknown connection connects, and then immediately disconnects whenever I save the mqtt settings in the vacuumer. Got any tips?
Thank you for the video. Been looking at Valetudo for a while now but there has not been many videos documenting the process. Will your PIR-sensors trigger if running the robot when not at home?
From what I remember he has a texecom alarm system, the PIR's for those are "Pet friendly" - not 100% sure on how they work, but they don't seem to detect anything at ground level (i.e. cats/dogs) - my two robot vacuums roam around whilst our (texecom) alarm is armed with no issues.
Good point, I do have pet safe PIRs so they shouldn't detect such a small object although it's definitely a good shout to actually test this before running the robot while the alarm is armed. That said, I generally just run the robot while I'm at home - not sure I trust it enough to leave it completely unattended!
Hello😊 Can I ask some a question about firmware extraction? I want to extract it to prepare for damage to the firmware, how can I extract the original firmware?
From the Valetudo site: "No multi-floor/multi-map support Due to various major technical limitations, Valetudo does not support and will not support multiple maps. If you need multiple maps, Valetudo likely won’t be an option for you. Not having multi-floor support actually isn’t something all too terrible though, as investing in a second robot greatly improves the usefulness of the unit. Having to manually carry the robot to another floor very much degrades the benefits of a fully automated vacuum robot. This “fire and forget” mode of operation was why you’ve considered to buy a vacuum robot in the first place, remember? As far as financial reasons are concerned, 200€ should be more than enough to buy a factory new supported one even featuring LIDAR. If you’re happy with buying a used unit, at least here in germany, supported ones usually cost around 70-125€ (2023-06-10) Rationally, there’s a need (automated cloud-free cleaning on every floor) and there’s also a budget for that. Make your buying decisions based on that and that alone instead of some arbitrary made-up additional constraint such as “Having more than one vacuum robot is insane!!111 I mean… Two robots! Who does that?!?!”. We’ve been working a lot on making that buying decision easier for you by supporting more robots and enhancing the support for existing ones so that it should be possible for everyone to afford 1-n supported robots."
Exactly. Some people enjoy not spending multiple hours dealing with Yaml files. Face it home assistant fans, you still have to do more coding than you do with most other home automation solutions, I don't care how good the UI has gotten. I don't have the time for that!
This is my thoughts exactly, while I do use Home Assistant now, my smart home was initially built purely using Node-RED (and most of my automation is still implemented in Node-RED with HA acting mostly as a UI and to talk to certain devices). Home Assistant fanboys actually put me off even trying it properly for a very long time!
@@camerongray1515 I use HomeKit as our smart Home dashboard and for automations. I know, sacrilegious. But Homebridge Virtual switches help me out with automating using the very limited HomeKit automations. Admittedly, HomeKit shouldn't be used as your smart home hub. Nonetheless, it works pretty well as one and is far above Amazon Alexa and Google Home automations. It also works completely locally. As a voice assistant, Siri is in our home, but we mainly use Alexa as we have one device and almost every room.
This isn't entirely relevant, but I absolutely detest, hate and loathe charge only USB cables, they are one of the worst inventions of the 21st century, the absolute bloody worst, I think they should be banned. I do understand that some devices use USB simply for electric power and I have no issue with that, but I've been through the pain of trying to locate a data transfer micro USB cable, and so I know what it's like. Sadly, you'll also find USB-C cables that support power only. I think all USB cables should be clearly labelled to indicate whether they support data transfer or not.
Very much agree, same goes for network cables that only have 2 pairs/4 wires that work, but only at 100mbps. Seen them quite often included with things like set top boxes where they inevitably end up getting bundled in with a pile of other cables and then get pulled out and used with something else that then only links at 100mbps. I now have a habit of throwing out such cables any time I come across them.
@@camerongray1515 I didn't even know such network cables existed, yuck, just yuck. How can you identify network cables that operate at a slower speed? I didn't know that such a restriction existed with network cables. Isn't Cat 6 E the latest standard? What standard do 100 Mbps cables comply with? I think most people have Gigabit capable gear now, so the cables you speak of would be quite old technology now, wouldn't they?
@@Lachlant1984 Fast Ethernet (100 MB/s) was introduced in 1995 as the IEEE 802.3u standard and remained the fastest version of Ethernet for three years before the introduction of Gigabit Ethernet.
@@camerongray1515 I discovered there are some devices that won't play nice with those cables I was actually using a pair of adapters which allow 2 network connections through one cable (limited to 100mbps though), but one of the devices just kept trying to establish a gigabit link over and over, and didn't fall back to using 100mbps (which i know it supports)
Just bought one and got it in today. They have revised the main board on this vacuum and it is no longer rootable. Just a PSA for anyone following along at home.
That's annoying! I was actually considering getting another for upstairs, will need to find an alternative model! Thanks for letting me know, I'll pin your comment for others to see
@@camerongray1515 It seems this is a pretty recent development, just posted on Valetudo. Maybe the new rev will be rootable in the future but all the Information I can find is the update on Valetudo (dated today) and Reddit thread from a few months ago where the poster ended up ordering a replacement main board and got the old board to transplant in.
The reason for those flash backups was in my head while writing that section but apparently never made it out of there into the text.
These two flash partitions contain the factory calibration and identity data which is unique for each robot and can't be recovered without a backup if data loss should ever occur.
Good catch, thanks!
That makes a lot of sense! Thanks for all of your work on this project, it's awesome!
I run three roborock s6 units with valetudo and feel spoiled. Wonderful local control and excellent software. I have mine saying "get out of my way" when the bumper hits anything. 😂
how did you change the voice sounds?
@@Thompson7177 you just upload the audio clips and the roborock oucher script will play them.
I'm glad Valetudo is getting some air time. For folks who have access to Dreame robot vacuums, they are *far* easier to hack as full disassembly is *not* required.
My head was still above ground after I recently fell into the home automation rabbit hole. Looks like that's about to change! The folks in my house are going to wake up one day and wonder why all the lights are flashing and all the speakers are saying "help me!" No, there's not a ghost living in my Home Assistant instance. The vacuum cleaner just fell down the stairs and is flailing around like an inverted turtle.
Edit: but seriously, this is awesome. I've been subscribed to you for a while and you always show the coolest stuff.
If you do have flashing lights make sure they are pinkyblue and don't forget to install a Japanese toilet.
Bought a Q7 Max+ for 236 Euro s today. Hope Valetudo runs smooth
This is pretty cool! I didn't think that it was possible to remove the cloud reliance on a robot vacuum
Tip when removing screws: it’s easier to track them if you use some masking or packing tape, fold it over on itself to make it double sided, stick it to the part and stick the screw heads to the tape.
Great Video... I was thinking of getting this Robot and was literally on Amazon when you posted this up. Amazing what you have done with it but my goodness what a teardown that is required!
You know it’s a great Boxing Day when Cameron uploads!!!!
I remember someone once tried to persuade me to fully switch to Linux (I do use Linux on some devices, but I don’t use it on my main computer, or my x86 based tablet, and I don’t use Linux on the ARM laptop either (out of fear of bricking it, as I cannot obtain factory restore media for it))
(For those wondering, the x86 based tablet and the ARM laptop both run Windows 11, both devices came with that OS from the factory, the only recovery media for the ARM laptop is a recovery partition provided by the OEM that is non bootable)
They also tried persuading me to get my entire family to switch to Linux
(I have never seen such excessive use of parentheses) 😅
factory restore media? you can just image the drive to another one and go nuts. ARM is cool. W11 is actual spyware.
@ha231 you're too young to know of lisp.
@@calvinbrowne2126 I've heard of it, but indeed have never used it. Still, bit odd to see so many used in this way.
I have just done this with the same vacuum! Wish I had found this video beforehand, the teardown would have been a huge help. I actually bricked mine the first time around (kept getting "error 14" at boot) and had to order a replacement mainboard from Aliexpress. Currently trying to get it connected to home assistant which shouldn't be too difficult hopefully.
I did not know there was open source FW for my Roborock. Thanks for the video “not” suggesting it.. 😅 I should try this on my old S5, I’ve always felt somewhat uneasy about it being in the cloud and not only local.
Buy the Roborock Q7 Max+ on Amazon (Affiliate): geni.us/fIt4rZ
This looks difficult but worth it!
I have a roborock S5 max so I will have to do FEL rooting as well... at least I got a good 2 years out of my cleaner. We'll see if I brick it or not, although the dissasembly might be a bit different this video is very good :)
Never knew most robot vacuum cleaners used Linux.
Linnox is on everything. Probably because it's open source and can run on extremely crappy hardware. I think that anything that needs to do any complex computing within the constraints of not so great hardware probably runs a flavor of Linnox on it. Robotic vacuums, smart home hubs, some ATM machines cash registers, although some stuff does run a flavor of windows if it has a screen.
Its the single most ubiquitous piece of software ever written...
If you think about it, it has to be running some sort of operating system realistically due to the complexity of the software etc and the number of pieces of hardware involved. And it’s not going to be running Windows or macOS, and Linux is much easier for random robotic cleaning companies to build software on top of than some exotic embedded OS.
@@tramcrazy that's what I'm saying. You have to actually run programs on the device. Maybe the most basic robots use ESP 32 devices, but even then you are stretching the limits of those devices.
sudo !! does the trick.
Do you think theres any value to making the test point and a ground pad accessible wihout having to completely disassemble it again ? Should hopefully not need back into FEL mode but would only take a minute or two more to run a few wires to somewhere a little more convenient.
Thank you for telling me this exists!
I have S7, and from looking at the UI, it seem to provide the same features as the stock App does, which is nice
Why is he doing all of this?
@@jordanasrukas4880Because in the default state the robot talks to the manufacturer's Chinese server the whole time while working. Some people don't want that to happen because it's not necessary for its functionality. So the question is: Why does the manufacturer force it then?!
This vacuum looks a lot like the heat alarm in my kitchen😂
Tbh I would pay someone if they would set one up for me 😆
That was amazing. Not sure I'd have the nerve to do that with a newly purchased device though. But it might be worth it just to run htop on my vaccum.😀 Were you tempted to try any other Linux stuff on it?
Thanks for an amazing tutorial, i've been wanting to do this for a while so appreciate you walking us through it. What was the name of the wall mounted touch panel, I didn't quite make it out. Cheers
Very cool 👌
Thanks for the great and informative video!
However I'm going crazy trying to get the Mqtt connection working. I've filled in the host, port, and credentials, but according to mqtt logs in HA, an unknown connection connects, and then immediately disconnects whenever I save the mqtt settings in the vacuumer.
Got any tips?
Any chsnce we can kamikazee through the bottom of this robot, to grt access to the two points? Asking for a friend...
Thank you for the video. Been looking at Valetudo for a while now but there has not been many videos documenting the process.
Will your PIR-sensors trigger if running the robot when not at home?
From what I remember he has a texecom alarm system, the PIR's for those are "Pet friendly" - not 100% sure on how they work, but they don't seem to detect anything at ground level (i.e. cats/dogs) - my two robot vacuums roam around whilst our (texecom) alarm is armed with no issues.
Good point, I do have pet safe PIRs so they shouldn't detect such a small object although it's definitely a good shout to actually test this before running the robot while the alarm is armed. That said, I generally just run the robot while I'm at home - not sure I trust it enough to leave it completely unattended!
hey, do you know if this will work on an x40 ultra complete???
What about Qrevo master?
Hi thank you for effort . I am wondering how to activate flashing mode xiomi mijia 1c
Hopefully someone finds a way to do this with the Eufy X10 Pro Omni
cool
So my Roborock s7maxV got bricked by itself. Any way to hard reset somehow? I tried everything I can find online and support service
Hello😊 Can I ask some a question about firmware extraction?
I want to extract it to prepare for damage to the firmware, how can I extract the original firmware?
Absolute madness 🤣
Could you hack it to be able to climb stairs, so it can do the upstairs of a house? 🤔
From the Valetudo site:
"No multi-floor/multi-map support
Due to various major technical limitations, Valetudo does not support and will not support multiple maps. If you need multiple maps, Valetudo likely won’t be an option for you.
Not having multi-floor support actually isn’t something all too terrible though, as investing in a second robot greatly improves the usefulness of the unit. Having to manually carry the robot to another floor very much degrades the benefits of a fully automated vacuum robot. This “fire and forget” mode of operation was why you’ve considered to buy a vacuum robot in the first place, remember?
As far as financial reasons are concerned, 200€ should be more than enough to buy a factory new supported one even featuring LIDAR. If you’re happy with buying a used unit, at least here in germany, supported ones usually cost around 70-125€ (2023-06-10)
Rationally, there’s a need (automated cloud-free cleaning on every floor) and there’s also a budget for that. Make your buying decisions based on that and that alone instead of some arbitrary made-up additional constraint such as “Having more than one vacuum robot is insane!!111 I mean… Two robots! Who does that?!?!”.
We’ve been working a lot on making that buying decision easier for you by supporting more robots and enhancing the support for existing ones so that it should be possible for everyone to afford 1-n supported robots."
Now let's do the same on cheap ip cameras :)
I'm still angry at Google for stopping support for the Dropcam.
Gotta ask a silly question??....will this work for a eufy X8 hybrid robot vacuum??...
Probably not unfortunately, no Eufy models are listed as supported on the Valetudo site.
The one I'm interested in requires a breakout board. Not sure I'm willing to drop 1k in case I fuck it up, but man... If it worked out...
Fedora Linux !
Make video for changing the voicepack, thx!
53:17 What touchscreen device is that?
Look on the channel a little over a year ago.
@@NearCry91 Thanks, T6E Tuya screen ruclips.net/video/bDWiQ2xNsTg/видео.html
I have a manual upright vacuum and I attempted to flash firmware to the operator, but my wife said "Not now, I'm vacuuming."
You have to shut it down first. Usually this is achieveable when you fist punch at the area where the cpu is located.
@@denis2381 you need Stella-Artois installed locally before you can do that.
As someone who doesn't use home assistant I can confirm how ruddy annoying it is seeing every other comment being "use home assistant" :D
Exactly. Some people enjoy not spending multiple hours dealing with Yaml files. Face it home assistant fans, you still have to do more coding than you do with most other home automation solutions, I don't care how good the UI has gotten. I don't have the time for that!
This is my thoughts exactly, while I do use Home Assistant now, my smart home was initially built purely using Node-RED (and most of my automation is still implemented in Node-RED with HA acting mostly as a UI and to talk to certain devices). Home Assistant fanboys actually put me off even trying it properly for a very long time!
@@camerongray1515 I use HomeKit as our smart Home dashboard and for automations. I know, sacrilegious. But Homebridge Virtual switches help me out with automating using the very limited HomeKit automations. Admittedly, HomeKit shouldn't be used as your smart home hub. Nonetheless, it works pretty well as one and is far above Amazon Alexa and Google Home automations. It also works completely locally. As a voice assistant, Siri is in our home, but we mainly use Alexa as we have one device and almost every room.
"In theory" 😆
Top Banana.! 🤍
£360 for a robot vac !
This isn't entirely relevant, but I absolutely detest, hate and loathe charge only USB cables, they are one of the worst inventions of the 21st century, the absolute bloody worst, I think they should be banned. I do understand that some devices use USB simply for electric power and I have no issue with that, but I've been through the pain of trying to locate a data transfer micro USB cable, and so I know what it's like. Sadly, you'll also find USB-C cables that support power only. I think all USB cables should be clearly labelled to indicate whether they support data transfer or not.
Very much agree, same goes for network cables that only have 2 pairs/4 wires that work, but only at 100mbps. Seen them quite often included with things like set top boxes where they inevitably end up getting bundled in with a pile of other cables and then get pulled out and used with something else that then only links at 100mbps. I now have a habit of throwing out such cables any time I come across them.
@@camerongray1515 I didn't even know such network cables existed, yuck, just yuck. How can you identify network cables that operate at a slower speed? I didn't know that such a restriction existed with network cables. Isn't Cat 6 E the latest standard? What standard do 100 Mbps cables comply with? I think most people have Gigabit capable gear now, so the cables you speak of would be quite old technology now, wouldn't they?
@@Lachlant1984 Fast Ethernet (100 MB/s) was introduced in 1995 as the IEEE 802.3u standard and remained the fastest version of Ethernet for three years before the introduction of Gigabit Ethernet.
@@camerongray1515 I discovered there are some devices that won't play nice with those cables
I was actually using a pair of adapters which allow 2 network connections through one cable (limited to 100mbps though), but one of the devices just kept trying to establish a gigabit link over and over, and didn't fall back to using 100mbps (which i know it supports)
$1500. Broom and dustpan cheaper