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.
Great framing, we’re incapable of maintaining a cloud solution that we built for a product we sold to you, so we’re taking it down for your protection.<p>I’m surprised that they aren’t charging their customers for such great service and attention to detail.
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.<p>It seems there were bought by a company called Vorwerk, and Vorwerk are shutting down the cloud infra.<p>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.<p>As an owner of one of these robots this is sad but not unexpected for anything relying on an app.<p>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.
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.
<a href="https://valetudo.cloud" rel="nofollow">https://valetudo.cloud</a> is the only one I know about but not sure if the controller in those units would be flashable.
Well, it appears that Neato/Vorwerk robots are not supported - at least they're not listed on <a href="https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/supported-robots.html" rel="nofollow">https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/supported-robots.html</a><p>> 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.<p>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...
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.
This reminds me a lot situation with computer games. Maybe stop killing games movement scope should be widened to all the software?
> This decision was not made out of convenience or incapacity.<p>I don't believe you...
Wonder why they built them like that? How was the decision made, just simply incompetence: they didn't know how to do it any other way, delusion: they expected to be become the Google or the Microsoft of vacuums: they'd never go out of business. Maybe just plain greed: wanted to milk their customers for extra features and disable them remotely if they stop paying?
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.
Sure, having legislation would help tremendously.<p>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...<p>...and not act all surprised when something stops working once the manufacturer calling it quits (or starts charging for a previously-free service).<p>Today, whenever i talk to others <i>how</i> i evaluate products i still get blank stares and i might as well have talked in a foreign tongue.<p>Also not happening: learning from $companys previous behaviour - stopped supporting something after a year? No parts, no schematics, no nothing?<p>Well - welcome to my shitlist of companies that'll never see another $/€ from me, ever again.<p>Doing this <i>eventually would</i> force companies to change their ways, but as long as they can continue selling whatever dreck they come up with to the masses...
You're blaming the end users. Most end users aren't aware of this stuff, and even if they are, have no practical way to evaluate quality in the way you've described. Even I, as a very technical person, could not evaluate if something is "hackable" without a huge amount of work, and not before I've purchased it.<p>Like similar cases (is this car roadworthy? are airplanes safe?), this is the classic case for regulation.
Then they will hopefully refund their customers.
> <i>Robots still work: Your Neato robot will continue to function manually. Simply press the button once to launch a full house run.</i><p>The title is strictly wrong, the things that's being discontinued is the cloud platform.<p>Still shit though...
> Robots still work: Your Neato robot will continue to function manually. Simply press the button once to launch a full house run.<p>Your title is wrong
Perhaps a better title is “to stop working in the way they were sold / advertised”?<p>Almost all functionality is being disabled, other than limited manual operation.
The functionality is very much reduced.