I recently bought a robot vacuum, installed valetudo, installed tailscale onto the robot itself and now I can control it from anywhere through my personal mesh vpn.

It's pretty amazing. Valetudo is perhaps the most opinionated software I've ever used, which comes with the good and the bad. But overall, it works and it does what it says it will do.

I don't really need to access it remotely, though it has come in handy: when heading out of town I can turn off the scheduled cleans and just run it once on the day I'm returning home. Which is really the only functionality you would need the manufacturer-provided cloud connectivity for.

It's been fun explaining to people that it's "declouded", but I can access it from anywhere. Melts non-tech peoples' brains a little bit.

I initially skipped this comment as sarcasm; it’s not! For other readers, the context: Valetudo is a custom firmware project.

> Cloud replacement for vacuum robots enabling local-only operation

To expand on laulis' comment: Valetudo isn't a full custom-firmware, it's a mod for the existing firmware. You copy on the Valetudo daemon binary, fuss with the init scripts to start the daemon, and fuss with the DNS and such to point some domains at 127.0.0.1 to talk to that daemon instead of the normal servers (well, actually you probably download a firmware image from dustbin that already has those modifications applied).

This is a distinction that is worth making because the robot is still running and relying on all of the on-robot proprietary code; it's just the in-cloud code that has been replaced.

it's a bit of a blurry distinction because, what is firmware if not the software that runs on an embedded device? a more accurate description would be that the high-level operating system (HLOS) has been modified to include the installation of a drop-in-replacement for the cloud API. the client side, and whatever hardware abstraction layer lives below it, is untouched. so the client thinks it's talking to the server but it's actually talking to a local open-source server.

I think it's also not quite correct to say the low-level firmware is unmodified, because with vale tudo you rely on the project author to provide a minimal rootkit that gets customized on a per-serial-number basis for the initial rooting.

from a high-level though, it delivers what it says on the tin - cloud features without any requirement of packets leaving your network or even the robot itself.

here's a talk from the author discussing his research https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfMfYOUYZvc

> I initially skipped this comment as sarcasm

Why on earth would you do it?! It was literally the comment I visit HN for - a solution for the problem we basically all have, already tested by someone, starting a thread with people's experience of it.

Not a custom firmware.

Custom man-in-the-middleware?

Cloud replacement.

Middle would imply there being another end still.

Local cloud running on your vacuum cleaner.

A dust cloud?

Happy Valetudo user for years. It has great integration with Home Assistant, too. Highly recommend.