…then proceeded to get stoned and watch it roam the house, doing it’s thing.

And then it dawned on me - I now have a completely self-contained autonomous robot that is free to roam my house, not attached to any cloud services, doing actually productive things; and I have full control over it.

I know it’s an odd thing for a grown-ass man to get excited over, but I can attest to the fact that 14 year-old me would be over the fucking moon about this. My parents got me the first Lego Mindstorms set for Christmas when I was younger, and I had an old Palm V handheld from my uncle; I managed to figure out how to control the Mindstorms controller with the Palm V’s built-in IR blaster, using just a “universal remote” app.

How far we’ve come… Just accomplishing this has given me a renowned motivation for self-hosting shit; it’s incredibly freeing. And knowing that the manufacturer of this vacuum could access it at any point and just outright shut it off without my knowledge… I don’t have to deal with that anymore.

The robot is a Wyze “Robot Vacuum” (model WVCR200S), which is based on the 3irobotix CRL-200S - the very same robot one author recently discovered was being intentionally shut off after he had blocked some telemetry URLs. I bought it for $20 on eBay. Fully functional, but the battery only lasted ~10 minutes from a full charge. Luckily it just uses four 18650 cells in series, so replacing those was a pretty simple task. I did not buy a whole new pack (most of them are expensive and falsify their true capacities), rather opting for individual Molicel P30B 3000mAh cells for ~$5 each. I ended up having to peel off the nickel tabs from the old cells and carefully solder them to the new cells, as I don’t have a spot welder. Lots of flux and a soldering iron set to 450C were key here. I would not recommend that method 😅.