Amazon and iRobot said regulatory concerns made it impossible for the deal to move forward, sending the Roomba makers' shares plummeting.
Amazon terminates iRobot deal, Roomba maker to lay off 31% of staff::Amazon and iRobot said regulatory concerns made it impossible for the deal to move forward, sending the Roomba makers' shares plummeting.
True story. I hate all those cloud devices, which can run perfectly locally. And doesn't require a subscription. I even see it back in cars nowadays, stupid subscriptions.
I put a wemos d1 mini in mine since all I need to do is mash the existing Clean button. The internal MCU runs on 3.3v, the buttons are pulled low and activated by the same 3.3v rail, so all I had to do was flash it with ESPhome and wire the low side of the buttons to a gpio. I wanted to read the LED state but the multiplex scheme wasn't worth decoding. I did use the single analog pin to measure battery voltage, and an input for the roller and blower motors.
I used Shark Ion RV750 and RV750N. Basically no parts cross over but the layout is very similar. Both were straightforward to interface with and even had a little slot the board fit in!
I have one and it works well. Vacuum and moping in one machine that costs a lot less than the irobot equivalent. You can also load it with Valetudo (open source robot vacuum firmware)
I didn’t realize that so I just went to check on mine and the integration is errored out lol. A quick look on the forums shows that multiple people are having the same issue. When mine was working, I only had a few options like start and go home so it wasn’t that helpful anyways. The roomba app did update with room mapping abilities but I was never able to get that information into home assistant so my only option was a full clean. Maybe it’s changed since mine stopped working but I can’t wait to get something that’s better supported and put this one upstairs where it only has a few rooms to clean.
Reasonably sure i can set up local control through home assistant. Haven’t looked too hard but I’ve always liked the featuresets on the roombas and the Amazon connection was the reason I haven’t done too much investigation yet.
It'd be an easy battle. The last iRobot device I had was a fickle piece of junk that'd error out constantly or ignore virtual walls. I'm on my second Roborock vacuum now and am very impressed with how well they work. I gave my first one away and it's still working great for the person I gave it to.