I think one major advantage of open source over commercial alternatives, is the possibility of endless improvements. Similarly, 3d printing as a manufacturing method allows for a short iterative cycle, high degree of design freedom, customisation as a product feature, local production, and an high degree of repairability.
It’s going to be interesting to see how well git(hub) and discord serves as collaborative tools in this case. Hardware files are often binary, hardware components have complex interfaces between them, and hence depends more on human communication and collaboration.
I really hope this project succeeds. I’d love a cloud free robot vacuum that I can trust.
Ordered one off Ali Express, and after another couple months, it also started dying. So replaced it with a newer Roborock.
Didn’t bother when the second S5 started doing the same, just got a new Roborock.
Both new ones have been going well so far, and while it does seem to be good for replacing parts (I had another lidar part fail, and the replacement was easy), I was disappointed that replacing the battery didn’t fix the shut down issues.
There’s supposed to be a build-along on YouTube but nothing there yet. The BoM is a bunch of aliexpress modules which is ok, but what about the chassis? Is that image generated?
The RFC calls to generate accurate models for the components, but the render looks like a full assembly?
Mmm I love the smell of slop in the morning
I don't expect a finished product. The value to me is the customizability and figuring out how to make it do what I want it to do. I'm sure that's not for everyone but like I have fingers. I can type. I can fix things. Slop is perfectly fine as a first draft because I'm envisioning a community of builders not a bunch of entitled twats who should just buy a Roomba.
Vibe coding doesn’t always have to result in low quality. An experienced engineer with good systems design skills piloting an agent can be incredibly productive. Although I’m pretty rusty at writing code, I’m still good at systems design and I’m having success with coding agents.
Recently, I’ve built a system for myself because what I wanted didn’t exist. There’s no way I ever would have done it without AI. I wouldn’t be able to pull it off myself even with years of time and a budget to hire developers for my personal project is nonexistent. It’s the kind of thing I never would have thought to start prior to good coding agents.
My productivity has been insane. I feel like there’s 10 of me. The quality of output is shockingly good. I’m looking at this and it’s one of the most put together systems I’ve worked on at any point in my career. It’s beyond what I saw from much more senior developers than I and it’s beyond what I was ever capable of myself.
I get why people don’t like vibe coding. It does produce a lot of slop in the hands of someone unskilled in the use of their tools. It costs people their jobs. There are a hundred reasons not to like it. The flip side is we get cool projects like this one because a single person can build the thing they always wanted and never could until now.
As best as I can tell, this project doesn't exist yet, just a bunch of boilerplate.
and
>It does produce a lot of slop in the hands of someone unskilled in the use of their tools.
Form a somewhat contradictory pair.
It's a good point, vibe coding does lend itself to fast splitting among developers with the intent of recombining quickly too into a larger project.
(I still use a traditional vacuum here, because all the privacy and snooping aspects of those robot thingies.)
No need for edges, also makes navigating through narrow things easier.
If you imagine a square robot traversing a wall and approaching a 90 degree inside corner, it can’t make the turn and would also be unable to make a perpendicular move to get more space.
That said Eufy, Makita and others make square-ish robots.
Perhaps not the place to share this, but it's depressing. I hope this proves me wrong.
Now, obviously they might just be bad at writing blogposts but surprisingly often it seems to be a decent red flag.
Because the thing is that the less effort you put into that the more anyone can just...reproduce the idea with their own LLM.
Even if s.o buil a cool thing and wants to share it with the world, if all they did was prompt Claude for a weekend what is stopping me from just doing it myself? Then I can even get it however I want.
The critical difference is that a project artifact (software or mechanical design) is good as long as it works. It might not be maintanable, or editable or extendable, but it might narrowly just work. But explanations don't work like that. The content, the actual words matter just as much as the overall message.
An explanation can be thought of as software executed in your brain as you read it. I don't want to execute badly written software in my brain.
Much like my own heaving ~/prototypes folder, there is an avalanche of small projects other people are building in their own spare time (with LLMs), and there is a subsequent avalanche of "check out my cool project" posts. This is cool! However, unfortunately, almost universally, there is very little follow through. If you come back to those projects after a month, most are abandoned.
The creators of the ones that tend to last, at least in my brief experience so far, _do_ write useful blog posts by hand, or put a bit of human effort into sharing what they've built. I guess when I encounter someone sharing their work by way of blog post, it feels to me like they don't really care about actually sharing that work.
Also -- and this is much more a me thing -- I'm just fucking tired of reading Claude's writing. I have to work with Claude most days, and seeing it take over the whole internet is suffocating. Inflicting more of it on others just sucks.
maybe something like:
- this specific part of the carpet is the best place to enter onto it
- once successfully on a carpet, stay on it until done cleaning itIt is not a robot firmware and has no role here.
Let alone why would someone want to attract the toxic culture that is the Valetudo creator and community?
This project seems like AI slop, but at this point that’s better than toxic dictators.
The AI slop on the site is not appealing, but it could also mean that the project will be parallelized successfully.
You can purchase a lidar vac for £70-80 now. Even if you only replaced the brains, that's a quarter of the price of a Oomwoo. The only upgrade I'd want is self-emptying. You'd probably have to relocate the charging contacts but it seems highly achievable.
Or you could break up an existing vac for the parts. You'd get the lidar, bumper, ToF, cliff sensors, motors and wheels, perhaps even some seals for your printed parts. Again, much cheaper, especially if you shop on the used market (I can get a whole working vac for the price of new wheels). All these robots use common parts so the risk of getting it wrong is very small.
My point is perhaps they could coalesce around a common white label option unit or set of parts currently sold as a vacuum.
The kit is a control board for the pump and boiler, and some add-on sensors for temperature and pressure. The "high end" features that it enables are almost entirely software driven, the main one being temperature control via PID. I've seen even simpler mods for other machines that bypass the "brew" button so you can do things like connect a bluetooth scale to enable brew-by-weight on a machine that doesn't support it, or add a shot timer.
The commercial version of this would be the Decent, but it costs 3x as much. I would love something like this for my robot vacuums. Valetudo is minimally invasive, but there's no reason you couldn't control the vacuum + wheels, but navigation is hard and those sensors are much more complex (can you even access the camera and undistort the image?)
https://gaggiuino.github.io/#/
† they pulled the rug on open firmware
They're fine to DIY if you're sensible about it. If you can build it, you can build a simple hydrostatic pressure tester. Pump, valves, tubes and a gauge. No computer parts. Pump the tank up to 1.5x rated pressure. This is industry standard.
But of course the age old saying applies: know what you're doing.
Edit: Ah, just found an "out of the loop" explanation here... https://old.reddit.com/r/gaggiaclassic/comments/1hbnd8r/out_...
I'd rather buy that and change some components to have local software. Similar to what this hobbyist sells for home assistant compatible home ventilation: https://github.com/arjenhiemstra/ithowifi
The dev opposes selling the connector PCBs, but people have always ignored that and sold them online. They're not hard to find, but having the PCB is really only the first step.
https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/supported-robots/#eurek...
I did this, it's as easy as it is described. Fully functioning robot vacuum free from the cloud.
I think the point of this is not to make "a product". It's just a fun project that you can build yourself or participate in some way with it's creation and/or funding.
It's not practical. That's OK.
Dreame's rebranded Mova starts at something like 350 EUR. Yes it's kinda capable and yet still kinda shit - gets tangled, stuck and needs quite some TLC. It doesn't look like it's going to be very reliable either.
I can't imagine how poorly 70 one can be.
Reminds me of people buying battery stick vacs without checking and then getting disappointed it's not same as dyson (while samsung as actually leads according to project farm tests).
We just got a second hand Ultenic T10. The 2021 model is commonly available for £40 used. It tangles a couple of times a week and its battery will probably need replacing eventually, but it maps well and empties itself. At that sort of featureset, just a brain transplant to get it offline would be a welcome upgrade.