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Oomwoo, an open-source robot vacuum you build yourself

makerspet.com

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Re: Oomwoo, an open-source robot vacuum you build yourself

#51

Post by dzhiurgis »

oliwarner wrote: post #41

The hardware is an issue, not because it's bad but because it's massively expensive to buy the components piecemeal. You can purchase a lidar vac for £70-80 now. Even if you only replaced the brains, that's a quarter of the price of a Oomwoo. The only upgrade I'd want is self-emptying. You'd probably have to relocate the charging contacts but it seems highly achievable. Or you could break up an existing vac for the p…

> £70-80

Dreame's rebranded Mova starts at something like 350 EUR. Yes it's kinda capable and yet still kinda shit - gets tangled, stuck and needs quite some TLC. It doesn't look like it's going to be very reliable either.

I can't imagine how poorly 70 one can be.

Reminds me of people buying battery stick vacs without checking and then getting disappointed it's not same as dyson (while samsung as actually leads according to project farm tests).

Re: Oomwoo, an open-source robot vacuum you build yourself

#52

Post by Planktonne »

jm4 wrote: post #15
shaunkoh wrote: post #7

Even though it’s vibe coded, I like the idea of an open source repairable robot vacuum. The current generation of them are notoriously not built to last / be repairable.

A few thoughts on the vibe coding… This is probably just one person and this project wouldn’t have seen the light of day if they weren’t able to vibe code it. A few years ago this would have to be a kickstarter that raised at least several hundred thousand- probably millions to have a shot at successfully getting off the ground. You’re talking software and hardware engineering, experts in multiple disciplines, a whol…

> It’s beyond what I saw from much more senior developers than I and it’s beyond what I was ever capable of myself.

and

>It does produce a lot of slop in the hands of someone unskilled in the use of their tools.

Form a somewhat contradictory pair.

Re: Oomwoo, an open-source robot vacuum you build yourself

#54

Post by kbouck »

my interest in this would be to customize the cleaning plan/logic... especially regarding traversing difficult carpets edges (which my roborock struggles with)

maybe something like:

  - this specific part of the carpet is the best place to enter onto it
  - once successfully on a carpet, stay on it until done cleaning it

Re: Oomwoo, an open-source robot vacuum you build yourself

#55

Post by pbmonster »

RobotToaster wrote: post #46
haellsigh wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For that, there's https://valetudo.cloud/ that supports a number of models from different brands.

None are particularly easy to flash, and the dev seems to have no interest in making it more accessible.

There's much to criticize about the dev, but there's really no way to make it significantly easier. Most robovac companies just don't want you to flash the firmware.

The dev opposes selling the connector PCBs, but people have always ignored that and sold them online. They're not hard to find, but having the PCB is really only the first step.

Re: Oomwoo, an open-source robot vacuum you build yourself

#56

Post by throwaway219450 »

oliwarner wrote: post #41

The hardware is an issue, not because it's bad but because it's massively expensive to buy the components piecemeal. You can purchase a lidar vac for £70-80 now. Even if you only replaced the brains, that's a quarter of the price of a Oomwoo. The only upgrade I'd want is self-emptying. You'd probably have to relocate the charging contacts but it seems highly achievable. Or you could break up an existing vac for the p…

Gagguino is a great example of this approach, licensing scandal aside†. Espresso machines are expensive and not because the software is particularly clever. They are electrically simple, but mechanically there's a lot of pressurized plumbing that you really don't want to DIY.

The kit is a control board for the pump and boiler, and some add-on sensors for temperature and pressure. The "high end" features that it enables are almost entirely software driven, the main one being temperature control via PID. I've seen even simpler mods for other machines that bypass the "brew" button so you can do things like connect a bluetooth scale to enable brew-by-weight on a machine that doesn't support it, or add a shot timer.

The commercial version of this would be the Decent, but it costs 3x as much. I would love something like this for my robot vacuums. Valetudo is minimally invasive, but there's no reason you couldn't control the vacuum + wheels, but navigation is hard and those sensors are much more complex (can you even access the camera and undistort the image?)

https://gaggiuino.github.io/#/

† they pulled the rug on open firmware

Re: Oomwoo, an open-source robot vacuum you build yourself

#57

Post by flexagoon »

camel_gopher wrote: post #33
Systemerror7A69 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit of an indicator about the effort they put into it. If they don't even write their blogpost themselves the question of "how much effort and thought did they put into the rest of their code / product". Now, obviously they might just be bad at writing blogposts but surprisingly often it seems to be a decent red flag. Because the thing is that the less effort you put into that the more anyone can just...reprod…

Or the time they had available. Maybe they have a full time job, parents to care for, kids to care for. But still they wanted to scratch the itch.

If someone has the time and opportunity to create a robot vacuum from scratch, they probably also have the time to write a short introduction for it

Re: Oomwoo, an open-source robot vacuum you build yourself

#58

Post by duskdozer »

cwillu wrote: post #32
jimnotgym wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't a AI generated blog post better than someone building a useful thing and nobody hearing about it?

No, it's not. It's an indicator that they're prioritizing the easy things surrounding the work, rather than the actual work.

Moreover, the work in the repo is only mockup images and LLM-generated "outline" text files.

Re: Oomwoo, an open-source robot vacuum you build yourself

#59

Post by tecleandor »

throwaway219450 wrote: post #56
oliwarner wrote: post #41

The hardware is an issue, not because it's bad but because it's massively expensive to buy the components piecemeal. You can purchase a lidar vac for £70-80 now. Even if you only replaced the brains, that's a quarter of the price of a Oomwoo. The only upgrade I'd want is self-emptying. You'd probably have to relocate the charging contacts but it seems highly achievable. Or you could break up an existing vac for the p…

Gagguino is a great example of this approach, licensing scandal aside†. Espresso machines are expensive and not because the software is particularly clever. They are electrically simple, but mechanically there's a lot of pressurized plumbing that you really don't want to DIY. The kit is a control board for the pump and boiler, and some add-on sensors for temperature and pressure. The "high end" features that it enabl…

Oh! I missed the Gaggiuino scandal. What did they do, stop open sourcing? Are they trying to get money from selling it?

Edit: Ah, just found an "out of the loop" explanation here... https://old.reddit.com/r/gaggiaclassic/comments/1hbnd8r/out_...

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