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winterbourne 55 seconds ago [-]
Nice! This is just what I'm looking for. An old Roomba 880 served us well until it could no longer charge its battery, even a new one.
The AI slop on the site is not appealing, but it could also mean that the project will be parallelized successfully.
shaunkoh 3 hours ago [-]
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.
RealityVoid 1 hours ago [-]
I don't know why you would say that, my Xiaomi s6's wheel motor died, I was bummed about it. I ordered a replacement motor, and to my surprise, I only had to open one or two screws and the motor module popped right out. The module had a nice slitting connector. I put the new motor back in and I was done. The thing must be at least 8 years old by now and it's still chugging along. I now passed it on to my parents and it's cleaning their house.
fy20 59 minutes ago [-]
Agreed. I have a 6.5 year old Roborock S5 Max, and it still works fine. I've replaced a few parts (can still get on AliExpress), but other than that no issues. It's cleaned 74km2.
moepstar 49 minutes ago [-]
Also very fond of the Roborock S5, in fact I recently got a second one for the other floor - totally took it apart, cleaned it, put it back together and stuck Valetudo onto it.
The first one is from 2017 and still going strong - issues so far: battery replaced (only recently), laser motor replaced, fuse replaced. Aside from the fuse it was very easy and doable for basically anyone.
jader201 19 minutes ago [-]
I’ve had two S5s die on me recently. They kept shutting down in the middle of a clean, and from what I read, it needed a battery replacement.
Ordered one off Ali Express, and after another couple months, it also started dying. So replaced it with a newer Roborock.
Didn’t bother when the second S5 started doing the same, just got a new Roborock.
Both new ones have been going well so far, and while it does seem to be good for replacing parts (I had another lidar part fail, and the replacement was easy), I was disappointed that replacing the battery didn’t fix the shut down issues.
fluidcruft 2 hours ago [-]
Agreed. I can code so I don't care whether it's vibecoded or whatever to bootstrap. Them working on designing hardware is what matters to me. I'll definitely keep an eye out for the kit, I don't have a lot of patience for hunting parts but would love to play with this.
throwaway219450 2 hours ago [-]
The issue I have is the documentation and “status” is slop. Looking at the repo, how much of it is even real?
There’s supposed to be a build-along on YouTube but nothing there yet. The BoM is a bunch of aliexpress modules which is ok, but what about the chassis? Is that image generated?
The RFC calls to generate accurate models for the components, but the render looks like a full assembly?
fluidcruft 2 hours ago [-]
When they get to the point of shipping a kit, why would I care? It's open source, just fix things. It's not rocket science, I'm just no good at working out the baseline machine that has parts to do the things. So I can't help at this point.
I don't expect a finished product. The value to me is the customizability and figuring out how to make it do what I want it to do. I'm sure that's not for everyone but like I have fingers. I can type. I can fix things. Slop is perfectly fine as a first draft because I'm envisioning a community of builders not a bunch of entitled twats who should just buy a Roomba.
jm4 1 hours ago [-]
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 whole team of people pouring in many hours to develop a product, etc.
Vibe coding doesn’t always have to result in low quality. An experienced engineer with good systems design skills piloting an agent can be incredibly productive. Although I’m pretty rusty at writing code, I’m still good at systems design and I’m having success with coding agents.
Recently, I’ve built a system for myself because what I wanted didn’t exist. There’s no way I ever would have done it without AI. I wouldn’t be able to pull it off myself even with years of time and a budget to hire developers for my personal project is nonexistent. It’s the kind of thing I never would have thought to start prior to good coding agents.
My productivity has been insane. I feel like there’s 10 of me. The quality of output is shockingly good. I’m looking at this and it’s one of the most put together systems I’ve worked on at any point in my career. It’s beyond what I saw from much more senior developers than I and it’s beyond what I was ever capable of myself.
I get why people don’t like vibe coding. It does produce a lot of slop in the hands of someone unskilled in the use of their tools. It costs people their jobs. There are a hundred reasons not to like it. The flip side is we get cool projects like this one because a single person can build the thing they always wanted and never could until now.
skyberrys 1 hours ago [-]
The name is exciting to me. I've been a multiple time robot vacuum owner and it does have an appeal to be able to see a fresh build dissected like this. Why not contribute to this project instead of having a go all on my own, except of course with my AI helpers. I could pick the vacuum control board for the motors and sensors. I have some thoughts on brushes too.
It's a good point, vibe coding does lend itself to fast splitting among developers with the intent of recombining quickly too into a larger project.
sqdiaz 2 hours ago [-]
Personally, I find open hardware to be the selling point for devices that are supposedly running open source. If I can't change the parts/components, there's really no point.
4 hours ago [-]
frio 3 hours ago [-]
I am bone tired of slop. This looks like a useful thing to build (the cameras in existing closed source robo vacuums creep me out), but when people don't even write their announcement blog post by hand it gives me zero confidence in the project getting anywhere meaningful.
Perhaps not the place to share this, but it's depressing. I hope this proves me wrong.
jimnotgym 23 minutes ago [-]
Isn't a AI generated blog post better than someone building a useful thing and nobody hearing about it?
Systemerror7A69 2 minutes ago [-]
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...reproduce the idea with their own LLM.
Even if s.o buil a cool thing and wants to share it with the world, if all they did was prompt Claude for a weekend what is stopping me from just doing it myself? Then I can even get it however I want.
Gigachad 5 minutes ago [-]
The AI slop is noise pushing out valuable posts someone put effort in to.
holistio 2 hours ago [-]
I just can't say how much I want to see the growth of open hardware.
AussieWog93 3 hours ago [-]
Man I wish was able to participate in this project.
colordrops 46 minutes ago [-]
What's stopping you?
teddyh 4 hours ago [-]
No information about whether it will run Valetudo.
fh973 11 minutes ago [-]
Valetudo is an API proxy to control robots via an associated app in order to avoid vendor clouds.
It is not a robot firmware and has no role here.
darlachaps 2 hours ago [-]
Why would it run Valetudo? Thats a product for rooted, closed-source vacuums.
Let alone why would someone want to attract the toxic culture that is the Valetudo creator and community?
This project seems like AI slop, but at this point that’s better than toxic dictators.
breznev 20 minutes ago [-]
Heh that was my first thought upon seeing this headline: how will the Valetudo guy contort himself to get upset about this to the tune of an unhinged screed this time?
The AI slop on the site is not appealing, but it could also mean that the project will be parallelized successfully.
Ordered one off Ali Express, and after another couple months, it also started dying. So replaced it with a newer Roborock.
Didn’t bother when the second S5 started doing the same, just got a new Roborock.
Both new ones have been going well so far, and while it does seem to be good for replacing parts (I had another lidar part fail, and the replacement was easy), I was disappointed that replacing the battery didn’t fix the shut down issues.
There’s supposed to be a build-along on YouTube but nothing there yet. The BoM is a bunch of aliexpress modules which is ok, but what about the chassis? Is that image generated?
The RFC calls to generate accurate models for the components, but the render looks like a full assembly?
I don't expect a finished product. The value to me is the customizability and figuring out how to make it do what I want it to do. I'm sure that's not for everyone but like I have fingers. I can type. I can fix things. Slop is perfectly fine as a first draft because I'm envisioning a community of builders not a bunch of entitled twats who should just buy a Roomba.
Vibe coding doesn’t always have to result in low quality. An experienced engineer with good systems design skills piloting an agent can be incredibly productive. Although I’m pretty rusty at writing code, I’m still good at systems design and I’m having success with coding agents.
Recently, I’ve built a system for myself because what I wanted didn’t exist. There’s no way I ever would have done it without AI. I wouldn’t be able to pull it off myself even with years of time and a budget to hire developers for my personal project is nonexistent. It’s the kind of thing I never would have thought to start prior to good coding agents.
My productivity has been insane. I feel like there’s 10 of me. The quality of output is shockingly good. I’m looking at this and it’s one of the most put together systems I’ve worked on at any point in my career. It’s beyond what I saw from much more senior developers than I and it’s beyond what I was ever capable of myself.
I get why people don’t like vibe coding. It does produce a lot of slop in the hands of someone unskilled in the use of their tools. It costs people their jobs. There are a hundred reasons not to like it. The flip side is we get cool projects like this one because a single person can build the thing they always wanted and never could until now.
It's a good point, vibe coding does lend itself to fast splitting among developers with the intent of recombining quickly too into a larger project.
Perhaps not the place to share this, but it's depressing. I hope this proves me wrong.
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...reproduce the idea with their own LLM.
Even if s.o buil a cool thing and wants to share it with the world, if all they did was prompt Claude for a weekend what is stopping me from just doing it myself? Then I can even get it however I want.
It is not a robot firmware and has no role here.
Let alone why would someone want to attract the toxic culture that is the Valetudo creator and community?
This project seems like AI slop, but at this point that’s better than toxic dictators.