Maker's Pet has launched oomwoo , an open-source robot vacuum that owners build themselves. The robot works by mapping the home with an inexpensive 2D LiDAR sensor and then navigating using ROS 2 and the Nav2 stack on Raspberry Pi, integrating natively with Home Assistant. It can be printed using a regular desktop 3D printer and runs entirely without the cloud, while the hardware, firmware, and software are all open under the Apache 2.0 license. Ilia O of Maker's Pet is also developing oomwoo in public "from the first commit," though the project is so early that it doesn't have any build instructions yet.
Right now, oomwoo is at the request-for-comments stage, with the current v0 milestone covering a 3D-printed chassis, a ROS 2 Gazebo simulation, and LiDAR mapping with manual SLAM, and the compute choice between a Raspberry Pi 5, an ESP32 running micro-ROS, or both is still open. Planned deliverables run from the bill of materials and printable files to firmware and a custom PCB, with the first BoM targeted for around mid-July.
The project is structured so the community can build it in parallel: the robot is split into self-contained modules, and contributors claim one and submit work as a pull request. A convenience kit will be sold through Maker's Pet, but Ilia says that buying it won't be a requirement, and every part can be sourced independently.
The usual route to a cloud-free robot vacuum starts with a robot you already own. Valetudo, maintained by Sören Beye since 2018 and also released under Apache 2.0, replaces a commercial vacuum's cloud connection with local-only control and Home Assistant integration. Installing it, however, means rooting the vendor firmware, which on many supported Dreame, Roborock, and Xiaomi models requires disassembly and voids the warranty, and also can't be undone.
The inclusion of local control could be a boon for getting more tinkerers and enthusiasts on board with the vacuum, following several examples of robot-vacuum security failures over the last few years. At DEF CON 32 in August 2024, researchers Dennis Giese and Braelynn Luedtke showed that several Ecovacs models could be hijacked over Bluetooth to reach their cameras and microphones, with Giese telling TechCrunch the security was "really, really, really, really bad."
Hijacked DEEBOT X2 units later shouted slurs and chased pets in several U.S. homes, and a token flaw in DJI's Romo line let one tinkerer reach roughly 6,700 vacuums worldwide , floor plans, and live feeds included. One owner went as far as reviving a remotely bricked vacuum with custom boards and Python to run it offline. oomwoo's reference design eliminates that attack surface, navigating on 2D LiDAR and bumper sensors with nothing pointed at the room.
(Score: 5, Funny) by SomeGuy on Saturday July 04, @05:15PM
Finally, something I can build that WON'T SUCK!
(was it supposed to put out _that much_ magic smoke?)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Saturday July 04, @05:41PM
This is going to become a popular meme.
I've seen youtube videos of people "hacking" dead internet radios by ripping out all the electronic guts and soldering in the guts from a plain old bluetooth speaker. If the speakers and battery and case are good, thats like 99% of the thing so just replace the board.
I don't think we are far away from projects like "rip out the PCB from an obsolete playstation portable PSP and stick a new board with a single huge FPGA on it in the case" If UMD as a media is dead, who cares if it all runs in emulation...
(Score: 4, Touché) by ledow on Sunday July 05, @02:17PM (2 children)
Why does it need LIDAR and all the other shite?
I have a commercial robot vacuum and it's no more complex than a floor-roaming pen-bot like we used to have in school in the 80's
He (I named him Bob) has several very limited modes - go straight, curve tightly to the left, curve to the right, and "follow the wall".
He has four sensors - a switch on his front panel that's pressed if he hits an object even lightly, an IR sensor underneath to detect "voids" ahead of hiim, and one that measures the vacuum to ramp up the fan if he goes over a particularly difficult surface, and an Wii-sensor-bar-like sensor on his front (which he uses to "home in" on his charging station that has several static LEDs when his battery runs low).
I could literally write the code for him in LOGO in about an hour, tops.
And he does a perfectly good job of vacuuming the whole house, not falling down the stairs, navigating over rugs, getting 99.9% of the house just through randomly changing between modes (e.g. just go straight, circle, or wall-follow by waiting for the bump and then moving the same way each time). He has no need of LIDAR, mapping, cloud servers (or indeed any connection at all), etc. and functions perfectly well as a robot vacuum.
Even the "home into the charger" code I thought was clever but it's pretty simple... look for the chargers arrangement of lights, follow it home. Same as a Wiimote uses to know where it is in space. The kind of thing you could have written in the 80's too.
Why do we need ALL THIS SHITE just to make a robot vacuum. The bill of material is ridiculous, and that you can 3D print the chassis, or that the controller is open-source is worthless alongside all the nonsense you need to make it work.
Try making something like my Bob... because he's far simpler, can be made from almost anything, and I could replace his logic with a few dozen lines of Logo, let alone microcontroller-C, let alone ridiculous amounts of python running on a Pi 5.
Hell, when his predecessor died, I was half-toying with the idea of opening him up and using my own controller to just drive his wheels etc. directly. Turned out that I'd already bought a replacement for him when I realised that it was just the battery connections which were faulty, which my dad repaired and that one now cleans their home. Same dumb design.
Overcomplicating shite is going to be the death of humanity, it really is. My Bob, with the chips found in toys and home computers from my childhood, would do just as good a job without trying to hunt down LIDAR modules to hoover up a dam floor.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mcgrew on Sunday July 05, @04:30PM
Why does it need LIDAR and all the other shite?
Simple, fools are willing to pay for it. I have a robot like yours, paid $160 for it years ago, before the pandemic. But they put LIDAR on vaccuums for the same reason they replaced all of the American pickup truck models with cars without trunk lids that look like pickups but won't haul more than I can fit in the trunk of my lidded sedan trunk, and charge nearly a hundred grand for them, three times what they cost twenty years ago because of all of the extra garbage in the passenger compartment; excuse me, "cab".
A robot like yours or mine, or one that cost a thousand. In the manufacturer's mind, what's the choice?
The Epstein Memorial Golden Presidential Ballroom: Let them eat cake.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aafcac on Sunday July 05, @04:48PM
It needs lidar for mapping rooms and knowing where it is so that it gets the whole floor.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dmc on Sunday July 05, @04:39PM
https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=69180 [soylentnews.org]
Notable for me was the fact that as a longtime holdout against the activitypubverse I encountered this story days ahead of encountering it at my other regular newsstreamsources (Though the sour that goes with that sweet is that the holos.social app I got from fdroid does not appear functional enough yet for me to simply manage a single long term public post (i.e. equiv of hosting a microblog in a single text(or html if you felt the need) file hosted by an apache/linux server).
Also, I thought my department name was more clever... For the love of patents... or not.
Hopefully the above hyperlink won't rot due to some future soylent change in rejected submission listings. I have my own print just in case. (it's 2026 jesus years and the browser cache browsing functionality of firefox is still Orwellianly depressing, even amidst current archive.org whining about commercial news organizations putting paywalls around their gardens of seeminglingly increasingly aislop sourced from paid-priority access to wikipedia's so callled 'creative Commons'.... People like to protect and personally profit from their fiefdoms...)