As more and more of the technology that we paid for turns becomes a subscription, there’s slowly been a momentum shift in the open source world of building replacements for these intrusive rent-seekers. We see this all of the time for self-hosted media and communications servers, but now we’re starting to see it in hardware as well. The OOMWOO robotic vacuum cleaner is completely open source, from hardware to software, and requires no cloud services whatsoever.
Although it’s open source, not every component is something one could buy off the shelf. It does require a 3D printer for most of the parts, but assuming that requirement is met most of the rest of the build comes together easily enough. For compute it relies on a Raspberry Pi running ROS 2 software and is set up to integrate easily with other existing open tools and projects such as Home Assistant. Like its proprietary cousins it can sense and map the rooms its placed in, but this platform uses an inexpensive 2D lidar system to keep costs down.
Right now the project is not quite complete, so we’ll all have to keep our eyes on this one as the team building it progresses. But they do have most of the software development done and the bill-of-materials is in progress. As an open project it’s being developed by many volunteers and there are a lot of areas available to contribute to as well, all currently set up on the project’s GitHub page. Right now many of those areas of effort are adapting the 3D printer files to off-the-shelf parts.
With the rocky status of the Roomba ecosystem, projects like this are more important than ever.
Okay OOMWOO is a clever name. Turn your phone upside down.
I don’t get it, I turned my phone upside down but the word on my laptop monitor still reads “OOMWOO”.
Yes i too don’t get it, my TV reads the same, also my back hurts
The shop vac I use to vacuum my home is a metal bucket on castors, a switch, a generic chinese engine, a switch and some bits of wire. Cleaning the floor is light duty work so I expect it to last for another 10 years or so.
Roombas and open source alternatives look complex as f࣭uck compared to this.
I have one of those myself, but I only just realized, it’s literally a bucket of suck.
Of course they do, as the Roomba like things have to add all the complexity of your human brain and body into the oversized hockey puck.. The actual suction path type stuff is pretty simple, and not very different to you bin with a motor though usually far far smaller to make the rest of it easier. As it is the autonomous navigation and locomotion skills, self emptying, self charging stuff that you the human do that make it complex.
Yes sure but doing the hoovering is time where you could have been doing something interesting or at very least productive
This sounds amazing and I’ll be following it with interest.
My only concern is the RPi at its core. Last I looked they don’t have proper low power states so it’ll still chew power when not in use.
But maybe they are doing some cleverness to turn it fully off when docked.
Is the dock not a charger? And could the dock not have enough smarts to power it on and off?
Looks like AI slop https://github.com/makerspet/oomwoo/issues/35
It’s AI generated code and maybe a mature level. Much like my own code, you wouldn’t call it slop, because it’s functional, mostly, but you might call it a mature or inelegant.
so far it is just AI generated markdown
Urgh hit by the software keyboard plague.
“at an immature level” that should have read
Yeah, fancy graphics and some text, nothing you can actually build or use. It’s just missing a kickstarter page ;)
Henry! Simple hoover does what it says on the tin, long lead simple manual wind up lead retraction, no batteries.
As a long term henry owner, can I ask how often youve replaced the exposed to conductive dust mosfet open pcb power board in the newer soft start models? Or did you bypass the board and fit a dpdt switch when it failed the first time at 3 years or so like most longer term owners who tinker…
Henry build quality (minus the unprotected mosfet stupidity), on batteries and remixed with control hardware from this project would be nirvana… Probably not attainable due to the power requirements of the suction motor though.
I wish eufy would be more open but sadly they are the only ones who can deal with pet fur without breakign and can still be cleaned nicely
The FOSS project Valetudo (also mentioned in the linked article about Roomba) supports quite a few robots from different brands.
If you manage to flash it on your bot, it sits there alongside the original firmware, basically replacing the cloud.
The ways of flashing vary, i used a breakout board to flash my dreame bot, and it works great. I control it via its physical buttons or a web interface (over local wifi only).
I think you can also integrate it into home assistant.