[simonlondon]

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.

[RealityVoid]

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.

[Animats]

Not quite a "cooking robot". It's a really fancy blender.

As a company, they don't seem to have anything as complicated as the Neato robot vacuum. So they presumably lack the in-house expertise to maintain it.

[ffsm8]

Before they made that cooking machine, they were in the business of premium vacuum cleaners -

[ikidd]

https://valetudo.cloud is the only one I know about but not sure if the controller in those units would be flashable.

[moepstar]

Well, it appears that Neato/Vorwerk robots are not supported - at least they're not listed on https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/supported-robots.html

> 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...

[Larrikin]

When I looked into it, it seemed like a community that loved freeing robots but was absolutely not willing to buy robots that the developers did not have access to. This seems like a fair stance and I think they will start receiving dead vacuums soon. Hopefully Neato's security is as bad as their business side.

[krater23]

I currently not expect a existing project, but the communication with the server is mostly xml, with the app too.