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I find this topic in particular difficult to judge because it:
- very much represents the Hacker approach of taking things down and rebuilding them in a better way
- contains technically interesting methods to circumvent DRM, region-locking, and replace the built-in manufacturer's cloud
- uses Node.js + React, so a rather popular web stack, and is Open Source, so it represents a learning opportunity based on a real-world project
- it's a genuinely useful product for people who like home automation
On the other hand:
- the project self-describes as highly idealistic, anti-consumerism, anti-hypergrowth, all of which don't really go well with VC funding or VC-style start-ups
- the author clearly doesn't want HN to talk about him or his project
But I find it problematic to follow your suggestion in general, because I'm sure many companies that get grilled on HN don't appreciate it. And that jwz blog who just redirects to an insult with a picture of hairy balls also keeps getting discussed on HN. Similarly, I'm sure Elon Musk, for example, also doesn't appreciate all the hate he gets here on HN.
The community rules here supersede how the internet operates. For example, if the author put up a message with profanity towards HN and the moderators here I'm sure HN would remove the link. So why doesn't it do it for something more polite?
I think this thread went a bit off-topic with heavy discussions about the community or developer.
As a user of Valetudo for 4+ years now, I can say that it's a wonderful Software once you get it running once. Depending on your vacuum model it's easier or more complicated.
I bought a used Z10 Pro 4 years ago and with a UART-to-USB I could order from ali-express I rooted it effortlessly.
Valetudo got many cool updates over the years and was always reliable for me.
Not once did I have to re-root or something because the Software bricked itself or whatever.
The updates were beautifully done and simply done in the UI. And I'm very happy that the Home Assistant integration worked great as well.
Personally I couldn't buy a Vacuum robot anymore without Valetudo. Having a remote controllable camera and probably even microphone in some models in my home seems insane.
The Defcon talks from Dennis Giese confirmed that some manufacturers literally send every log line to their cloud server and there was already some bigger mainstream drama of vacuum pictures ending up on facebook somehow a few years ago.
Well, same. The thing is that, if my stock vacuum starts behaving erratically, I can always contact the manufacturer without fear of being banned.
At this point, I have to choose whether I want a vacuum that phones home, or one where I know absolutely zero people will be able to help me, because they (and me) have all gotten banned.
I can see why author's strictness in adhering to his community rules is off-putting, but at the same time, for all the complaining, I do not see anyone being willing to put the effort in to build a different community. Yes, this is work, but one wants it, go and do it (not referring specifically to you, stavros, but to the general theme in the entire discussion).
After all, this is free software, published under the Apache 2.0 license. Fork it and build a community you want it to have (you don't even have to do any code changes, and you can simply reject any external PRs more politely :)).
With that said, maybe the author is right in wanting to keep this "infrastructure" boring and to attempt to safe-guard their time, but at the same time, they do spend a lot of time defending their approach to this and complaining how nobody has read their 20 pages of "community instructions", which really, is an expected behavior for everyone (no matter how much one wishes otherwise). I can't not wonder if it would be less time & energy consuming if they did it more politely?
There's a huge amount of drama over there because hypfer came in and tried to poison everybody against him.
> I have only 3 relevant interests here:
> Spreading information about offline IoT, because this is the journey on which using Valetudo has put me
> Providing a safe space where anyone can discuss ANYTHING about Valetudo, without fear or retribution
> Provide help with Valetudo to anyone, including people who don't want to create a TG account, and especially people who were banned from TG
I've kind of gone down the rabbit hole on this whole thing this morning and after a lot of reading my conclusion is that the leader of this project thinks that they are communicating far more clearly than they are. But trying to use an analogy of a private garden when it's clear that they just don't want to field questions from people is not the way to communicate.
Here's another relevant example. Somebody that did a huge amount of work and then asked a technical question that reflected that they had done the work and was banned with no comment.
> With all of that prerequisite searching out of the way, I decided to create a Telegram account to join the support chat and ask there whether or not splitting the "Mop Dock Wastewater Tank not installed or full" error into two distinct errors has already been investigated, and to express this as a feature request if it hasn't. I included justification for why I think it might be a feasible task, since there are three vendor error codes in DreameValetudoRobot.js mapped to that error and it stands to reason that maybe they could be split out with some basic testing.
> The next notification I saw from Telegram was: Valetudo: Hypfer !pban 1y
To manage expectations: It is less active than the official channel of course, but then it is not as old as the official TG groups and it's not exactly endorsed by the developer (e.g. it's not linked to on the Valetudo website as an independent/alternate support platform). But it's an option to discuss Valetudo and related topics, and get some support if the official way doesn't work out.
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with that Discord, I just happen to hang out there.
You misunderstand, I didn't say hypfer should or shouldn't do something. I said I don't want to use his project, as is my right, because I don't like being banned from talking to anyone who might have the same problem as me if I say something hypfer doesn't like.
Even so, I'd be happy to run a community for any other project, but I don't really like hypfer's behavior and don't want to help him out.
One option is to not help him at all: fork the project, run it completely independently in any way you see fit.
Many a FOSS project has been forked due to disagreements with how it was maintained, technically or socially — this is the lovely thing about free software, that the author agrees to as well.
The escape hatch is the feature that force everyone to be nice.
What if you don't like Windows 11 forcing to make an account? You get a time machine, go back 30 years and start a hobby OS project and hope the best.
What if you don't like Linux? You fork the project and just ignore what Linus publish in his tree. (The hard part is doing a better job than Linus and convincing enough people that you can do it.) So Linus must be nice enough to keep most people happy.
Not _most_ in the sense of a plurality of all users. _most_ in the sense of some subset of contributors. Free software is still a dictatorship of the able. A person who cannot contribute (whether that be code or money to pay someone else to code) something important is still without recourse.
If Linus decided to add a bunch of malware to the kernel, my mom would still be unable to fix that.
FOSS is still better than proprietary, but it's not perfect either.
You are right, but your mom would easily benefit from someone else who would be able to fix that: free software relies on the fact that someone "able" is at least not looking to hurt you, which is, for a popular enough software, a given.
For software that is not popular enough, you are right that in practice, your mom wouldn't be able to do anything other than stop using the software.
But of course FOSS is not perfect, it's just a way to empower your users: nothing more, nothing less.
Edit to answer the first point: free software as a cultural movement grew out of a need to control the hardware a software engineer bought and which came with no source code for the drivers. Friends made along the way was great, and I agree that's lovely, but ultimately that's what free software enables, among other lovely things (like not depending on a manufacturer you disagree with, or another programmer you disagree with).
Forking a project does not duplicate the effort — collaboration requires a lot of effort, and the more collaborators, the more expensive it is (usually even more than 2x). This is why many well-run free software projects have their own BDFLs (Linux, Python... OK, maybe not so benevolent at all times :)).
If the two of us wanted to take a project in a different direction, and insisted on keeping it a single project, we'd have to do more work to reach compromises all the time, neither side ever being fully happy, but doing duplicate work for an imperfect result.
As you are well aware, RoI calculation is not as simple as LoC count, and typing in the code is the fast part. With two projects with clearer missions, willing contributors flock to the one they align better with, which leads to one being more stable, another being quicker to add new features.
And no, getting all of those contributors on a single project would not result in a single project that is both stable and adding new features quickly.
Obviously, no expectation on you to do anything. I just find it surprising you do not see the value in a different way to organize a community compared to what's common, even if what's valuable to you is different.
> I can't not wonder if it would be less time & energy consuming if they did it more politely?
This is an interesting question that comes up from time to time and it's actually not as it seems.
While it is work and taxing at all, the whole act of explaining is actually not very expensive. In fact, it is simply tapping into the stream of consciousness and piping it into a text input.
What _would_ be expensive actions would be to:
a) _not_ explain, see that something isn't quite right and then try to handle the internal discomfort sparking from that.
b) mask and play a different "more polite" role, which actually just means "accepting the unsolicited emotional offloading and the task of handling those attached to it"
both being "providing a service" to the random person that just approached me, and operating in a style that is unnatural to me.
This is counterintuitive for the vast majority of people, because for them it works exactly the other way round.
Doing this emotional labor for free would also be just giving away the thing that makes me money.
Specifically, being able to understand technical details and also communicating those to people that won't necessarily do.
Effectively, the free-plan includes technical support but not emotional consulting.
This, for some, is hard to understand, for others, it is hard to accept.
And, of course, it always gets worse when social media (like HN) is involved, because these machines erase any context and replace it with violently jamming in defaults + rewarding those that dunk the hardest and make the in-group of the mob feel pleasant feelings.
I get you, and I can understand how emotionally taxing it is to not do anything and "keep it in" (should have said this, could have done that, why are they not reading simple instructions... — I've spent one too many sleepless nights mostly when I wasn't behaving as myself but rather adapting to social expectation).
So I think you are completely right to set the boundaries you want to set, but perhaps you can recruit someone else in the community who doesn't get so annoyed at people not respecting others' time, because let's be honest, that's what people do (mostly because it usually works due to the social norms being what they are).
It is why some people are unapproachable and build boundaries (eg. imagine even executive assistants to executives in order to not divide their attention on every little thing).
> but perhaps you can recruit someone else in the community who doesn't get so annoyed at people not respecting others' time
No, I can't.
The world, in this aspect, is wrong. It is flawed. Rotten, even.
I (and actually we) cannot approach this by just accommodating what is broken.
Everyone has been doing that and you can see what damage this has done to democracy and to reality itself.
As the docs state, Valetudo is counter-culture. The definition of being that is that you will hear a steady stream of loud screaming, because culture is being countered.
If this stream stops, that means that the countering also stopped.
I do not think that we can afford to let the world deteriorate even further than it has already. We need to re-learn context. No matter how painful that might turn out.
I know HN is the last place for this :D But I also didn't ask to be linked here. I did however ask to not be posted here anymore.
I also believe that Valetudo is a unique opportunity for this, because no one is being held at gunpoint and forced to use it, nor will anyone die because they can't use it.
But, at the same time, it is highly-polished software that just works and offers massive amounts of value for free. You only pay with accepting that context exists and that other humans exist.
> It is why some people are unapproachable and build boundaries
This is precisely what I am doing. I would argue thought that the "unapproachable" really depends on where one is coming from.
We are getting philosophical, but I wouldn't say the "world is wrong": the world simply is.
Yes, people engage on a topic they have spent few thoughts on. But let's be honest, many who have spent many thoughts on something do not really come up with some genuinely interesting insight either. Thus I have doubts that humans as a whole can "re-learn context", and even those who can, will usually not invest enough in the topic the other side might care about.
I applaud you for your desire to "fix the world", but over time, I've learned to accept it for what it is, and I don't feel the same annoyance you seem to when I am being misunderstood even when I state things plainly (I am mostly — I admit — smugly amused, except when it's the person who can directly affect my life).
Anyway, as long as you are not overly frustrated, keep doing what you are doing (which sounds like building great free software for de-clouding robot vacuums), and fighting the fights that matter to you!
Yeah that’s fair. Personally I very very rarely use manufacturer support because it’s just very limited. And also likely limited to 2 years.
And when the software is fully offline and I control the update cycle, it’s unlikely the vacuum will just start misbehaving unless the actual hardware is damaged
Someone else had the same problem and helps, the way I help other people with their problems.
You seem to be saying that OSS communities don't help, which is obviously not true. I'm a member of many OSS communities where users help each other, and that's a core part of why I prefer OSS projects.
I do not ban most people as so much that I ban people that did not read and act according to the rules of the space.
Which does turn out to be "most people" when you look at an unfiltered set of all humanity, because the ideology of the space is rather far away from that baseline.
That is on purpose though and clearly explained many times in the documentation.
The "Why not Valetudo?" page is a good start. The "FAQ" also houses some info.
Code of Conduct, obviously and the Contributing.md too.
The information is out there and I did try my best to make it comprehensible and coherent.
Most people that get banned usually get banned because they did not read the information first but instead showed up with defaults.
Your reasons are your own, but that doesn't change my point above. For me, an OSS project without a strong community looks about as bad as the original manufacturer software, with all the phoning home and other disadvantages that entails.
I am not in any way challenging that. That is the correct Take-away.
Genuinely.
As said, the culture is different. I do not intend to convince you that my project would be better than what the vendor can offer.
In fact, you have correctly pointed out that in your situation, the vendor might actually offer the _better_ experience with actual paid support.
Not sure how this is off-topic, software and community go hand in hand. Despite the focus on community, there is still a healthy emphasis on the software part (and many compliments lol).
Clicking on the link to valetudo.cloud redirects me to hn, but typing the address not. Seems to confirm messages complaining about the projects community/leaders....
One thing that amuses me is that this could mean "health" (in Latin) or "anything goes" (in Portuguese; normally two words). They're actually from the same root (valeo, 'to be well, to be OK, to be valid'; I think the oldest meaning is 'to be strong'), then with the Latin suffix -tudo (like our -tude, meaning the state or condition of being a certain way), or the separate Portuguese word tudo 'everything' (originally from Latin totum, meaning 'all, entire').
So, the Latin one is like "OK-ness", and the Portuguese one is like "everything is OK" (here in the more modern sense of being allowed, rather than the older sense of being in good condition).
So the name is actually genius! You get into valetudo expecting hygiene and wellness but as you encounter the community you discover it's actually about intense fighting.
Can't recommend this project enough. I've set this up for myself and multiple people that saw mine and wanted a de-clouded vacuum robot and they all love it. Several L10s Ultras and an X40 Ultra. Takes a bit of effort (and a dongle if you want to keep things as simple as possible) but I wouldn't have one of these things running around the house any other way. Haven't tried reaching out to the community, so can't speak to that, but I'm really grateful that people put this type of effort into projects like this. Same goes for e.g. NetGuard (Android firewall) - not sure I'd every comfortably have an Android phone without a tool like that.
I believe that Roborock is no longer actively supported so if you want one of these, get one of the Dreame models listed on the site. Dreame sells refurbished units on Ebay for a pretty steep discount (L10S for as low as ~$200 with a warranty that I believe this doesn't void if you don't brick it) and that's what all of my purchases have been. Just make sure the one you're getting is listed on the site (Pro vs non-Pro, 1 vs 2, etc.) since only very specific models are supported.
Been running this for years. Absolutely fantastic, my vacuum has never touched the "cloud" and yet I can still run it remotely (or with "smart" run automations) via Homeassistant.
Adding to the praise of "it just works". My Dreame L10S Ultra was straightforward to root after getting the breakout PCBs required. Now it only talks to NTP and the update server when I remember to check for updates every few months.
I don't have any links for assembled boards, but there seem to be some available [1]. You can find the PCB files here [2] including more documentation. The same page also has a Telegram group link to find people near you who might be able to help out.
I got my PCBs made via JLCPCB, but there are other options as well. Pay attention to select the correct PCB thickness, noted in the Readme. I fell into that trap and had to order again. Sourcing the USB port with the correct footprint was a bit annoying, I just ended up ordering a selection of kits with multiple variants from Aliexpress.
Double check your vacuum model. I transformed my vacuum into a neat (well, not really) pile of parts in about an hour only to find mine isn't supported. Apparently S7 MaxV Ultra is a completely different PCB and SoC than the supported S7 variants (S7/S7 Pro Ultra). At least I cleaned it while disassembling, so it wasn't a total loss :)
I briefly considered connecting an ESPHome module to the 'start' button so that I could at least start cleaning from Home Assistant, but since it still won't give me errors if there are any, that seems like a half assed thing to do..
I think there's an actual Roborock integration for HA. I forget if it's official or on HACS, but I've used it and it worked well at the time. It requires cloud, which obviously isn't ideal, but better than nothing IMO.
But according to the FAQ, the vacuums still dont work when they are offline, as they will turn reset their wifi until they are online again.
> When the vacuum is disconnected from the internet, it will attempt to disconnect itself from Wi-Fi and reconnect itself until it can reach the Roborock servers.
Yeah, that’s exactly what happens if I don’t add an exception for it to my iot vlan - it keeps reconnecting to WiFi. Scheduled cleaning doesn’t work without internet either..
I guess I’m not buying the next vacuum until I’m 100% sure it works offline and supports Matter or something..
It's really shameful that the tech gods (i.e. us) have made it almost impossible to have useful technology that does our bidding without first signing over our privacy and sometimes our very personhood.
Valetudo is really nice software, but I have a bad taste in my mouth from the community.
I went to the Telegram channel to ask something about why my vacuum running Valetudo would have a specific behaviour (IIRC it moved on its own), they kind of talked to each other for a second to discuss if this question was relevant to the channel, and then, presumably deciding it wasn't, banned me for a year.
Yeah, I’ve never seen a community more off-putting than this one. I’m thankful for it, it works on my robot, but I wouldn’t help or participate in any way.
But it’s like they don’t want help or be a community like mentioned in their docs.
In contrast, for example, https://github.com/Koenkk/zigbee2mqtt was such a welcoming community.
> This project is the hobby of some random guy on the internet. There is no intent to commercialize it, grow it or expand the target audience of it. In fact, there is intent to explicitly not do that.
Then it begs the question of why they even publicize the Telegram chat. I guess it’s for contributors only, not a support chat.
Totally second that, I was banned today on their Telegram channel just because I mentioned that I recorded a r2con2025 presentation to free Samsung PowerBot VR7000M vacuum cleaners (no Samsung bot seems to be supported by them to date), titled "Restoring the Vacuum" in here:
I wish I didn't mention Valetudo positively on my presentation now. Hypfer has bizarre (to say the least) views about what community building means and entails.
Oh, see, I actually wish I was part of a community that would have flagged this to me. Maybe there is? Regardless, thank you for sharing, I'll be watching this :)
Why are you talking about business? What about this relates to business?
Obviously the thought was that the content was interesting to the people that would be interested in this software because it's about rooting vacuums and taking control of them.
It's nice to get your reply here so I can see what the community is like myself.
Can't speak for Hypfer but I guess he doesn't mean the monetary side of "business" as most people understand it but the "attention" (of reading/checking the talk and link, etc..), so I don't fault him for that.
Full disclosure: I'm not getting paid nor seek money from what I found on my alleged "ad", btw.
Business in this case means a clear transactional mindset.
And you do get paid, just not in cash.
You push your brand, your credibility as a security researcher and all that. You earn social credits and reputation.
And that is why you tried to hook people to watch your talk.
I bet the talk is good. Great, even.
But this (maybe even not conscious) transactionality just does not belong in that space. HN, for example, is a much better place for it.
> And that is why you tried to hook people to watch your talk.
I gotta wonder if whoever you banned really deserves this. I think there's a world of difference between an individual just sharing something they worked on and a corporation spamming your channel for profit.
Sure, but the action is still incorrect and that's why the reaction was removal.
Deserving sounds like a punishment, but it's just action => reaction.
Attendance privilege was misused so it was revoked for a while.
I get where you're coming from, but the question there always ends up "where is the line?"
The answer in this case makes it simple. The line is crossed the moment transactional self-promotion happens.
No surprises for anyone. No discussions about which groups might be allowed to do so and why.
A simple "no transactionality full stop".
Btw, most bans in my space expire after a while, because I do believe that people can and will change, but, as per the CoC, there is also another way to appeal a ban.
> The line is crossed the moment transactional self-promotion happens.
I understand where you're coming from now. I was confused at first because I make a conscious effort to differentiate this from commercial advertising.
I think it's only natural for people to want to share their work with peers. I agree that sites such as this one are the appropriate places for posting such things. I just hesitate before calling it advertising which has much darker connotations.
I posted the exact model name & number and there's indeed quite a lot of hardware specs detailed on the talk itself (Allwinner A20 SoC, btw) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"There was no relation to Valetudo"... well, with your current behavior and tone as a community "admin", you're certainly making sure I'll not work on that direction in the near future (I do have it mentioned as future aim on my last slides).
Yeah, they seem pretty clueless. Right now they're doing the classic 302 back to Hacker News when you visit with an HN referrer. So they appear to have this extremely unnuanced approach to wielding power where they just block people with minimal reasoning.
I used to focus always on the tech. Now I focus on the people. No time for this kind of behavior.
Yeah its sorta hilarious that someone has taken a "make my life simple and easy" technology to the extreme of "if you don't solder your own breakout board you should get off my lawn".
I'm hoping to sidestep the drama and just enjoy the software.
Because the gp comment is not about grapheneos, but its creator and could be taken as insulting (considering none of them is likely to be actually schizophrene).
I thoroughly disagree. On the surface, his behavior may seem very similar to the behavior exhibited by toxic people, but once you understand his reasoning, I find it makea perfect sense.
To summarize and paraphrase: the project is his personal garden. It's by him, for him. But he has also decided to open that garden to any random stranger on the internet, free of charge. In a lot of similar projects, that means an invitation is extended to plant stuff in the garden or to suggest that certain plants are moved. He wants to make it clear that that's not the case in his garden. If you wanna plant, you're free to freely and instantly duplicate his garden and get cracking. But he will not be planting your plants in his.
Since people struggle to accept this, he's taken on a harsher-than-normal tone. That's understandable to me.
You're just making excuses and ignoring the problem.
The problem is being verbally abusive towards people with no ill intent of any kind is unacceptable in ALL circumstances. No exceptions. You can refuse requests and ban whoever from your chatroom, that is his right.
You don't get the right to abuse and mock and harass people. Ever. Assuming that you do makes you a toxic asshole.
It's all very cut and dry. There's not really a gray area here. You either treat people with dignity or you're an asshole. Insisting that this kind of behavior is ever acceptable or excusable just means that you're also an asshole and looking for ways to rationalize and justify your own behavior.
> If this was the case, why have a public telegram group then?
I recently set up my first Valetudo robot, and therefore thoroughly read the documentation multiple times. In it, he comes across as genuinely wanting to help people succeed running Valetudo. I assume that's the reason for the group chat. At the same time, he also very very much does not want to give people the illusion that they can demand anything from him. The fear that people will is not unfounded. Think of what happens in any moderately popular FOSS project. He's just opting out of all that, in no uncertain terms.
> Sounds more like a fetish basement than a garden to me.
Fine. So he's made a fetish basement, and he's letting others use it for free. He wants to make sure that nobody demands, or even suggests, he change his basement to accommodate their fetishes.
There's a way to do all that without being an arsehole.
Also putting an open source project out there doesn't absolve you of all social obligations simply because it's free. You can't say "well you are free to not use it, then it doesn't affect you at all" because that isn't true. By making and publicising this project he is actively discouraging other similar projects from happening - ones that might have less toxic leaders.
I should write a blog post about that because it seems to be an extremely common misconception.
putting an open source project out there doesn’t entail _any_ social obligations actually.
I can imagine the author took abuse from some extremely entitled people for some time and then just snapped.
If you ever ran any moderately successful oss project you get dozens of these people all the time; they demand your time, work, and attention and screech, complain, and blackmail you if you don’t instantly succumb to their demands.
It’s the one thing that always turned me off from doing oss more seriously;
users are just the worst.
Of course only a small fraction of users but if you have many users it’s a never ending flood
> Also putting an open source project out there doesn't absolve you of all social obligations simply because it's free.
If I understand the guy correctly, he doesn't think that sharing software that he wrote comes with any obligations once he's sufficiently informed the recipients about damage it may cause. I agree with him.
I don't. Not morally anyway. By sharing it he's ensuring that no other less toxic projects can flourish (at least not as easily). That comes with some moral obligation not to be a complete dick.
The toxicity is not about accepting contributions. I have zero issues with this, the project is, as you said, his personal garden. But the behavior in chats is absolutely toxic.
If you put out a sign "come listen to my music" and then throw out every second person, everyone wearing blue and every blonde with no warning, that is toxic. It is your play, but you are not treating people coming in with respect. My 2c.
No. There is 0 reason to be toxic or an asshat in general. It should not be accepted. He might have reasons to be protective, but one can do that in a respectful manner. But going around, making something up, banning people for asking or criticizing is not the way to go.
Once you make something public it's not a private garden anymore.
> No. There is 0 reason to be toxic or an asshat in general. It should not be accepted.
So, you wanna shame or force him into accepting contributions? That's ridiculous!
> Once you make something public it's not a private garden anymore.
Wait, are you saying if I have an actual garden that I myself own and maintain, and I let random people from the street come see it between noon and five every Sunday, it's no longer my private garsden? Then you and I are on different planets in this debate.
You forgot to quote the part where I said he can refuse in a normal and respectable way.
If you make a garden and then declare it a public garden then yes. If you want people to not step on your flowers you can tell them in a normal way. No need to shout around, belittle them, and ban them from your garden for a year....
He could have just kept his Project private if he doesn't want people to interact. Simple as that.
> If you make a garden and then declare it a public garden then yes.
He didn't. He made a garden, declared it private, and set specific terms under which you and I and others can come enjoy it. Take it or leave it.
> No need to shout around, belittle them, and ban them from your garden for a year....
Then follow his rules, or don't go to his garden! He's offering you a free favor. Take it or leave it.
> He could have just kept his Project private if he doesn't want people to interact. Simple as that.
Of course he could have. However, I'm adamant that those of us who find Valetudo useful – i.e. find his garden beautiful – would be worse off for it. Why would you want the overall usefulness given to the world to decrease? What's the benefit? Not feeling annoyed that he won't let you help?
See, this is what I don't understand about this type of developer.
When you publish an OSS project, it is an implicit invitation for collaboration, and for being part of a community around shared interests where everyone benefits. That is the entire point of F/LOSS.
Yet I've heard many people, on here, in fact, arguing against that idea. That publishing free software but not accepting feedback, contributions, or providing support, still counts as OSS. And, technically, that may be the case if you consider OSS to only be about the license itself. If you take license terms like "THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND" as the only literal definition of what OSS is. When, in fact, it is, and can be, so much more than that.
People who think like this are doing themselves and their software a disservice. Software is better when it is worked on as a community effort, much like a garden. An individual might have good ideas, and be able to execute them well, but they're not omniscient nor omnipotent.
If Linus Torvalds had published Linux as his "personal garden", it would have never been even remotely as good and popular as it is today. It would have probably been another niche project in the footnotes of history.
> When you publish an OSS project, it is an implicit invitation for collaboration, and for being part of a community around shared interests where everyone benefits. That is the entire point of F/LOSS.
There is no one single "entire point of F/LOSS". Even in the struggle to name it (free software vs open source software), the desire and intent is obviously different.
Sometimes people build something and publish it because they are OK if someone else makes something else out of it, extends it or whatever... But they don't want to be bothered about it anymore.
Running a community around a free software project indicates desire to collaborate on something, but even that does not indicate a desire to collaborate on everything this project could become (imagine someone coming in with a desire to port it to robot mowers — sure, it sounds related, but the author might not have any interest in it if they are living in an apartment, and they don't want to spread their limited time and energy on maintaining something they will never be able to test/support themselves).
> Sometimes people build something and publish it because they are OK if someone else makes something else out of it, extends it or whatever... But they don't want to be bothered about it anymore.
I understand that. My argument is that that mentality is doing the project a disservice. For every person the author might find difficult to collaborate with, there will be many others who will contribute positive input and changes to the project. By not being open to collaboration, someone else will step in and build that community instead, given that the software is actually good. And that's fine, it's their prerogative, but chances are that their closed-but-technically-open project will languish in comparison to the project that's actually open and invites collaboration.
So, really, I don't see what they gain from releasing it as open source in the first place. Personal satisfaction from thinking they're helping others by providing code only? Building their personal portfolio or brand? For demonstration purposes? I honestly find it puzzling.
> Running a community around a free software project indicates desire to collaborate on something, but even that does not indicate a desire to collaborate on everything this project could become
And that's fine as well. No project will satisfy the use cases of everyone. The line has to be drawn at some point, and this should be made clear. Upstream code contributions often add additional maintenance burden to core developers, since the contributor will likely disappear once their code is merged. Forking is always an option when visions don't align. I get all that.
But it's one thing to have a clear focus for the project, and another to make it completely closed to contributions. Or to have this confusing in-between state where you have a website to promote the project, provide user documentation and places for community discussion, but then alienate your users by being hostile, not open to feedback, etc. It sends mixed signals to anyone interested in the project and willing to give their time and energy to improve it.
This is why I strongly believe that OSS only works when there is an environment of mutual good will, respect, and collaboration that allows a community to thrive. This is not encoded in any legal frameworks or licenses because it doesn't need to be. It should be common sense that the alternatives lead to everything OSS is opposed to: less freedoms for users, and proprietary software that benefits only a select few.
> I understand that. My argument is that that mentality is doing the project a disservice.
In the world where we accept unfinished software all around us, from government and banking services, to our daily general computing devices like computers and phones, to appliances like TVs, washing machines or elevators, the project seems to be doing great for many a user: we've heard accounts here from people putting the software on their device once years ago and forgetting about it — it just works.
Their focus seems to be exactly that: ensure this project works for them, and allow a select few trusted partners to make it work for their own equipment too. But work it must.
I might have a different perspective on making software and evolving it, but that does not make this perspective any less valuable — it's actually great to have it out there in the world.
> For every person the author might find difficult to collaborate with, there will be many others who will contribute positive input and changes to the project. By not being open to collaboration, someone else will step in and build that community instead, given that the software is actually good. And that's fine, it's their prerogative, but chances are that their closed-but-technically-open project will languish in comparison to the project that's actually open and invites collaboration.
The project has been there for years now, and this hasn't happened. Either there aren't "many" who'd "contribute positive input and changes", or the issues with the project management aren't as big as some are making it seem here.
> So, really, I don't see what they gain from releasing it as open source in the first place.
They don't have to gain anything: they publish it because they don't mind it, not looking for any gain.
> This is not encoded in any legal frameworks or licenses...
Many companies have nothing to lose if they released their IoT device firmware as open source, but they have nothing to gain either, so they don't do it. I'd much prefer it if they released it, even if for the most part, I wouldn't touch it.
But I'd feel the sense of trust that this device is never dying on me, even if a company does.
So I disagree: a free software license is enough to "encode" all that you seek! Just by having access to the source code, and rights to modify and distribute it, anyone can decide to build a different community, evolve a product in a different direction, or change it to have a new technical foundation.
When this need becomes strong enough, it will simply happen: for better or for worse. See eg. LibreOffice vs OpenOffice case. Or the cdrtools maintainer frustration with Debian/Ubuntu forks (https://cdrtools.sourceforge.net/private/linux-dist.html).
> See, this is what I don't understand about this type of developer.
That's ok. It's ok to be different. I'm probably more like you for my own projects, but that doesn't invalidate this guy's stance.
> When you publish an OSS project, it is an implicit invitation for collaboration,
and for being part of a community around shared interests where everyone benefits.
It is not.
> That is the entire point of F/LOSS.
If it were, don't you think that part would be written into at least one popular FLOSS license?
> People who think like this are doing themselves and their software a disservice. Software is better when it is worked on as a community effort, much like a garden. An individual might have good ideas, and be able to execute them well, but they're not omniscient nor omnipotent.
Who are you to decide for another person? Can I decide such things about your actual garden?
> If Linus Torvalds had published Linux as his "personal garden", it would have never been even remotely as good and popular as it is today. It would have probably been another niche project in the footnotes of history.
I'm glad he didn't. But if he had, do you really think that shaming or pressuring him into doing it differently would have in any way made him feel like continuing? Linux would have died.
> Contrary to common expectations when it comes to software released under a FOSS-like license, Valetudo is not a community-driven project; nor does it even have a community in that sense.
And I witnessed similar, very unfriendly interactions.
Heaven forbid you go there simply to praise the project. The last guy to do that got a 2 year ban and many, many paragraphs of irrelevant pseudo intellectial nonsense from the maintainer.
Not going to paste the message directly - but it happened five days ago and was along the lines of "thank you for breathing new life into my robot which was otherwise destined for landfill".
A few years back I wanted multifloor on my Valetudo (I had a weird single room which had a step into it) so I did my research and found a whole bunch of toxicity around this feature, mixed in with a bunch of information which mostly answered my questions (it wasn't supported, which of course I was fine with, because it's not my project and I was just grateful for being able to use it). I figured "oh, this would be useful to document", popped onto the Telegram and asked a few clarifying questions, saying I intended to contribute to the docs.
First I was accused of not reading the docs (I had, they were confusing and incomplete), then I was accused of trying to sneak multi-floor into the product (..what), then I was accused of being a "well-off boomer who wanted him to do extra work because I wouldn't spring for a third vacuum" (I WASN'T ADVOCATING FOR MULTI-FLOOR). So I backed off and watched for a bit, then landed up leaving.
I have no desire to force change on the man (it's his garden after all); ultimately, GitHub was the wrong destination for his work. It's sort-of like he's opened a workshop in the middle of a bustling market and now he's barking at everyone for interupting him.
Recently an error popped up in Home Assistant, so I hazarded a look at the issue tracker to find he'd closed an issue and banned a well-regarded Home Assistant community member for opening it: https://github.com/Hypfer/Valetudo/issues/2310
Wow, that issue is illuminating. A simple heads up leading to a multi-page meltdown against an individual he banned. It was even pinned in the repo at one point.
I feel a bit honoured that I got a response within 3 minutes …
But I also feel a bit weird because I was trying to support your way of running your community. So yeah, I was trying to do a balanced take on why Valetudo is good despite some people having a bad experience with the telegram channel.
Dude if you have a whole thread of people you have all these problems with, maybe it's you?
> I have no desire to force change on the man (it's his garden after all); ultimately, GitHub was the wrong destination for his work. It's sort-of like he's opened a workshop in the middle of a bustling market and now he's barking at everyone for interupting him.
I actually have no idea who Hajo is. If they’ve been annoying in the past, and you banned them for it, it’s not really my place to figure out whether they deserved it. I only replied because yelling about it here is a sure fire way to get your comment flagged. Maybe you don’t mind but I felt that, spending far too much time here and watching a bunch of people do this repeatedly even though it’s against the rules, I might as well send people a reminder that there’s another option.
As for your Telegram chat: I actually genuinely do not care, and I mean this without trying to be smug or anything. I joined to ask about S8 stuff and eventually just met Dennis directly. Ironically both of us seem to have gotten too busy with work to actually get to a good solution for those and I never actually ended up installing Valetudo anyway. My friends occasionally tell me how great it is and I feel a little but of regret for not following up to get the exploit stable but I just put up with letting my vacuum do its thing without any of the smart features :( But yeah, I really don’t think I would have gotten any value from rejoining the chat so I didn’t. I’m actually kind of sorry I participated in the conversation I did, not really because I wouldn’t stand behind what I said but more that it was kind of a waste of time and low value to even respond. And clearly it made you upset, so considering I valued it at effectively zero and you definitely felt it was negative, I think the conclusion is pretty obvious.
One thing I do want to say, though: I feel like you frequently run into your project just causing you misery. I work on FOSS too, and arguably I work in a similar hacking-ish space too where random people show up and beg you for support, who don’t really bother to read the rules, etc. I get that this is frustrating. I ban plenty of people who drag down the place too. But I think that your garden that you’re trying to make might actually be causing you more trouble than it might be worth. I don’t wake up feeling drained that I have to interact with the community, in fact I actually appreciate talking to many of the members even if they can be annoying sometimes. I’ve had people occasionally claim they were unfairly treated (usually I disagree, of course) but I think the sentiment is largely positive. So, like, I just want to point out that it’s possible to enjoy what you do; it can be nice even if sometimes frustrated people show up. I just don’t want you to hate working on the things you’re doing.
I have yet to see anyone attack you, here or in any of the links people have provided. I don't know all the history of your interactions with these people, but it feels like you are playing the victim without cause.
You were not worthy of consorting with the council of wizards.
In all seriousness though, I didn't need to search too hard to find numerous other testimonies of the project author acting neurotically. I'm not sure you missed out on much. Someone on Reddit mentioned being banned after joining the Telegram group for a similar question only a week ago.
>Contrary to common expectations when it comes to software released under a FOSS-like license, Valetudo is not a community-driven project; nor does it even have a community in that sense.
How can someone ban someone from a community if it doesn't have one.
Saying it doesn't have a community doesn't magically make it true. There are people in that Telegram channel who talk to each other about the software, which is what a community is.
> The docs say "search before asking"...did you do that?
This was a typical response that makes people hate communities.
I cannot stress this enough
Just because the user didn't find it doesn't mean they didn't search
It especially pisses off the noobs, because, frankly, they are noobs! They didn't even know what to search for yet! They're learning. Search is still a hard problem. Get a few words wrong and you'll get nothing of value. Worse, it'll lead you to lots of irrelevant information you don't yet know is irrelevant.
The worst part is when it's claimed it's been discussed and no link is provided. If you know it's been discussed, prove it with a reply with the link, then move on. At worst you have made the issue easier to find. At best the issue isn't actually related and you've gained clarifying context.
But banning is just a silly response that's clearly going to enrage people. Are you building a community to work together or a community to circle jerk?
At least when Linus yells at people he explains to them what the issue is.
If they spend time handholding 1000s of lazy people not willing to do basic search provide logs etc before helping they would spend all their time handholding instead of working on the software they are coding in their spare time as a hobby.
As much as I personally do not like the abrasiveness from many open source devs I empathize with their behaviour as most people are not willing to do the slightest work to help themselves and just expect to be hand fed. And this abrasiveness usually comes after years of trying to be helpful.
Btw if you asked a question then got an answer and figured it out hopefully you would have added it to the help notes of the open source software you are using so others would find it
It seems you did not read my comment. Here, let me reiterate in case you are too lazy to look back. I even indented it to change formatting the first time
>> I cannot stress this enough
>> Just because the user didn't find it doesn't mean they didn't search
Handholding isn't hard. You can be firm and critical while doing it too. See my example.
> provide logs etc
They probably could, but that depends on the community.
> I empathize with their behaviour
I do not. It is better to just leave the message on read than to respond with hostility. Growing up around my house we stressed "Thumper's Rule"
If you don’t have somethin’ nice to say, don’t say nuthin’ at all.
It applies here too. You can just ignore it instead of investing your time getting upset. You'll feel better too! Maybe just give them more time to keep searching. If you must respond, suggest a query. Either way you're responding, but a nothing response is a lot less effort than an angry response.
> Btw if you asked a question then got an answer and figured it out hopefully you would have added it to the help notes of the open source software you are using so others would find it
I do!
But not in communities I get banned from for not finding the (supposedly) previously discussed issue. They won't let me.
Seems to redirect back to HN now when you visit it from HN?
Still glad it was mentioned here. Have been pondering buying a vacuum robot for a while and the missing privacy was off putting, so I haven't bought one yet, and I only today learnt of the project.
Can somebody who runs this on one of the recommended Dreame mopping robots say from experience whether you actually lose some kind of essential features the built-in firmwares have? The "why not" page says feature parity is a non-goal but only specifically mentions multifloor where I can understand the reasoning.
Any backstory to this or is the developer just not a fan?
<script>
// Every _single_ time it devolves and turns into shitflinging with nice words. Please just go away
if (document.referrer.includes("news.ycombinator")) {window.location.replace(document.referrer)}
</script>
The comments here seem to prove him right. Half of them are airing their personal grievances or talking generically about what it means to have a community.
HN frontpage posts also have a way to get the attention of some pretty shitty people, directly or indirectly. HN itself takes active steps so site operators cannot detect when someone is coming from HN or not (like adding noreferrer to links to some domains) so the admins here are aware of the problem and decide to go against linked authors' wishes.
You won’t miss much. The only thing I am missing is the mop after vacuum functionality, which was kinda borked and eventually removed in Valetudo for my specific model (Dreame L10s pro ultra heat)
I recently got an “older” generation robot vacuum for this reason. I wish the dreame debug board was more accessible. The designer and creator purposely made it this way so people would learn how to solder. I could solder but I no longer have the time or patience to source my own PCB and parts. Thankfully, someone sells one premade on Tindie.
The overall "I want you to have a project, not a product" vibe put me off using this when deciding what robot to buy. I want a clean floor, not another hobby that turns into a chore at the least opportune moment.
Luckily, someone explained to me that in practice once you've set up, it usually just works, and it runs completely on the robot (i.e. no second device/server/homelab that you'd have to maintain) and since updates are optional, you shouldn't be required to deal with it unless you want to.
(The offputting statements are at https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/why-not-valetudo.html: "it is very much not [a product]. [...] Instead, it is highly idealistic, anti-consumerism, anti-hypergrowth and anti just-continuing-what-we-do-now. [...] these aspects are baked into its design. There is no way of using it without being constantly confronted with them. If you’re not willing to reflect, introspect, grow and most importantly stop, you will not be happy with Valetudo.", plus this "not selling PCBs out of principle so people have to source and solder themselves" - I can solder, but I prefer to delegate boring, efficiently automatable tasks to robots in a factory and would much rather pay someone 10 bucks for a finished board than pay more for the shipping of individual parts and end up with 4 extra unpopulated PCBs that I have zero use for.)
I wholly agree with the anti-closed vibe. I even run Valetudo on my roborock. But lol I just want to control my vacuum cleaner locally and that's it. I haven't updated mine for years exactly because I just want shit to work and not have to be constantly fixing things and "be confronted".
> This project is the hobby of some random guy on the internet. There is no intent to commercialize it, grow it or expand the target audience of it. In fact, there is intent to explicitly not do that.
> Think of Valetudo as a privately-owned public garden. You can visit it any time for free and enjoy it. You can spend time there, and you can bring an infinite amount of friends with you to enjoy it. You can walk the pathways built there. You can sit on some patch of grass and maybe watch a Duck or something. You can leave a tip in the tip jar at the entrance if you really enjoy it and want to support it flourish.
> You can take inspiration from it and bring that home to your own garden, giving it a personal twist and adapting it as needed. You can even make friendly suggestions if you have a really good idea that ties into the vision that is already there.
> But, at the end of the day, you must understand that it is still privately-owned. You’re on someone else’s property over which you have no power at all. You will have to show the necessary respect. And - most importantly - you need to understand that letting you into this garden is a gift and should be treated as such.
> If you don’t like this garden because you don’t like how it’s structured, or you feel like it’s missing something, or maybe I choose the wrong flowers to plant over there that’s fine. It’s just not for you then. You can leave at any time.
>There is simply no ground to stand on to demand change to the garden. It doesn’t matter if it would attract more people or if all the other gardens in town are doing something in a specific way. It doesn’t matter if your idea of what gardens even are differs. This at the end of the day is simply private property with free public access as a gift to everyone.
> When it comes to software development, everyone has access to infinite plots of undeveloped land that they can claim at any time. Therefore, a garden being build with a specific vision does not take away the ability for anyone else to build their own garden with a different vision.
I think "discuss" is actually an interesting and probably accidentally specific (and correct) choice of word here.
If you look up the definition, you find
> to talk about a subject with someone and tell each other your ideas or opinions
> to talk or write about a subject in detail, especially considering different ideas and opinions related to it
In contrast, the garden text:
> You can take inspiration from it and bring that home to your own garden, giving it a personal twist and adapting it as needed. You can even make friendly suggestions if you have a really good idea that ties into the vision that is already there.
This software and the hacking scene around it are amazing!
I’ve got a Dreame L10s Ultra based on the compatibly guide. Joined my local Telegram group, grabbed a USB board, and the same day was interfacing with the vacuum’s Android OS. Once I started SSHing in to upload custom sounds, I couldn’t stop. Way easier than I expected.
Haha yeah that's exactly what I did with my roborock as soon as I rooted it. The voice sentence "Going back to the dock" had such a weird accent that I immediately replaced it. So awesome to be able to do that with a device you own.
I wish I could use this but last I checked, every supported robot used consumables for cleaning (like vacuum bags). My current vacuum robot uses no bags and has washable filters so nothing gets consumed. Turns out that was more important to me than local-only operation.
On the subject of bags vs cyclone collectors, My mother hates the cyclone collectors with a passion. and a disposable bag was item number one on her list of features when we were looking for a replacement vacuum for her.
I had never considered the subject before and sort of naively assumed that because the cyclone collectors were newer they were better. But she does not like cleaning them out and would rather have a bag so the whole thing can be disposed of neatly.
Never heard of this before, what a great project! I wish my Roborock QV 35A was supported. Still considering sponsoring the project though, because what a great initiative it is!
If you buy your vacuum in china it’s about half price, but it’s geolocked to the mainland. There’s some dodgy looking Cyrillic project that unlocks it via VPN or something like it.
IMO not worth it now that Dreame started to repackaging their bots into cheaper brand Mova for roughly half price too.
My cleaner robot isnt even connected to wifi. Why would it need to be? When i go to work, i hit the clean button. When i come back, my floors are clean. I honestly wonder what more one could ask from such a machine.
I have a schedule in home assistant for it to run on all weekdays at 1pm, except if my partner is home, it won’t run. She is afraid of robots and i wouldnt hear the end of it if she encountered it and couldn’t disable it. Home assistant knows if she is home based on her phone.
I have been exploring valetudo because the roborock integration breaks pretty often. But it seems like a chore and could brick my robot.
<script> // Every _single_ time it devolves and turns into shitflinging with nice words. Please just go away if (document.referrer.includes("news.ycombinator")) {window.location.replace(document.referrer)} </script>
If a site does not want traffic from HN, shouldn't HN remove the link?
I find this topic in particular difficult to judge because it:
- very much represents the Hacker approach of taking things down and rebuilding them in a better way
- contains technically interesting methods to circumvent DRM, region-locking, and replace the built-in manufacturer's cloud
- uses Node.js + React, so a rather popular web stack, and is Open Source, so it represents a learning opportunity based on a real-world project
- it's a genuinely useful product for people who like home automation
On the other hand:
- the project self-describes as highly idealistic, anti-consumerism, anti-hypergrowth, all of which don't really go well with VC funding or VC-style start-ups
- the author clearly doesn't want HN to talk about him or his project
But I find it problematic to follow your suggestion in general, because I'm sure many companies that get grilled on HN don't appreciate it. And that jwz blog who just redirects to an insult with a picture of hairy balls also keeps getting discussed on HN. Similarly, I'm sure Elon Musk, for example, also doesn't appreciate all the hate he gets here on HN.
> the author clearly doesn't want HN to talk about him or his project
The author has a HN account, but seems to have gotten upset after having a few comments flagkilled
That's not really how the internet operates, or was meant to - and besides, it looks like the author has already solved the problem on their end.
The community rules here supersede how the internet operates. For example, if the author put up a message with profanity towards HN and the moderators here I'm sure HN would remove the link. So why doesn't it do it for something more polite?
I think this thread went a bit off-topic with heavy discussions about the community or developer.
As a user of Valetudo for 4+ years now, I can say that it's a wonderful Software once you get it running once. Depending on your vacuum model it's easier or more complicated.
I bought a used Z10 Pro 4 years ago and with a UART-to-USB I could order from ali-express I rooted it effortlessly. Valetudo got many cool updates over the years and was always reliable for me. Not once did I have to re-root or something because the Software bricked itself or whatever.
The updates were beautifully done and simply done in the UI. And I'm very happy that the Home Assistant integration worked great as well.
Personally I couldn't buy a Vacuum robot anymore without Valetudo. Having a remote controllable camera and probably even microphone in some models in my home seems insane.
The Defcon talks from Dennis Giese confirmed that some manufacturers literally send every log line to their cloud server and there was already some bigger mainstream drama of vacuum pictures ending up on facebook somehow a few years ago.
Well, same. The thing is that, if my stock vacuum starts behaving erratically, I can always contact the manufacturer without fear of being banned.
At this point, I have to choose whether I want a vacuum that phones home, or one where I know absolutely zero people will be able to help me, because they (and me) have all gotten banned.
I can see why author's strictness in adhering to his community rules is off-putting, but at the same time, for all the complaining, I do not see anyone being willing to put the effort in to build a different community. Yes, this is work, but one wants it, go and do it (not referring specifically to you, stavros, but to the general theme in the entire discussion).
After all, this is free software, published under the Apache 2.0 license. Fork it and build a community you want it to have (you don't even have to do any code changes, and you can simply reject any external PRs more politely :)).
With that said, maybe the author is right in wanting to keep this "infrastructure" boring and to attempt to safe-guard their time, but at the same time, they do spend a lot of time defending their approach to this and complaining how nobody has read their 20 pages of "community instructions", which really, is an expected behavior for everyone (no matter how much one wishes otherwise). I can't not wonder if it would be less time & energy consuming if they did it more politely?
This person wanted to create an alternate community because the Telegram channel was such crap.
https://www.reddit.com/r/valetudorobotusers/comments/1lmz85n...
There's a huge amount of drama over there because hypfer came in and tried to poison everybody against him.
> I have only 3 relevant interests here:
> Spreading information about offline IoT, because this is the journey on which using Valetudo has put me
> Providing a safe space where anyone can discuss ANYTHING about Valetudo, without fear or retribution
> Provide help with Valetudo to anyone, including people who don't want to create a TG account, and especially people who were banned from TG
I've kind of gone down the rabbit hole on this whole thing this morning and after a lot of reading my conclusion is that the leader of this project thinks that they are communicating far more clearly than they are. But trying to use an analogy of a private garden when it's clear that they just don't want to field questions from people is not the way to communicate.
Here's another relevant example. Somebody that did a huge amount of work and then asked a technical question that reflected that they had done the work and was banned with no comment.
> With all of that prerequisite searching out of the way, I decided to create a Telegram account to join the support chat and ask there whether or not splitting the "Mop Dock Wastewater Tank not installed or full" error into two distinct errors has already been investigated, and to express this as a feature request if it hasn't. I included justification for why I think it might be a feasible task, since there are three vendor error codes in DreameValetudoRobot.js mapped to that error and it stands to reason that maybe they could be split out with some basic testing.
> The next notification I saw from Telegram was: Valetudo: Hypfer !pban 1y
> I do not see anyone being willing to put the effort in to build a different community.
There is a small community on Discord: https://discord.gg/tfPVDGQuYm
To manage expectations: It is less active than the official channel of course, but then it is not as old as the official TG groups and it's not exactly endorsed by the developer (e.g. it's not linked to on the Valetudo website as an independent/alternate support platform). But it's an option to discuss Valetudo and related topics, and get some support if the official way doesn't work out.
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with that Discord, I just happen to hang out there.
You misunderstand, I didn't say hypfer should or shouldn't do something. I said I don't want to use his project, as is my right, because I don't like being banned from talking to anyone who might have the same problem as me if I say something hypfer doesn't like.
Even so, I'd be happy to run a community for any other project, but I don't really like hypfer's behavior and don't want to help him out.
One option is to not help him at all: fork the project, run it completely independently in any way you see fit.
Many a FOSS project has been forked due to disagreements with how it was maintained, technically or socially — this is the lovely thing about free software, that the author agrees to as well.
No, the lovely thing about free software is that enables people to work together, not that it has an escape hatch for when they can't.
Forking a project duplicates effort and requires much more work than just allowing collaboration.
Again, though, I have no particular desire to do anything here. I don't even use my vacuum.
The escape hatch is the feature that force everyone to be nice.
What if you don't like Windows 11 forcing to make an account? You get a time machine, go back 30 years and start a hobby OS project and hope the best.
What if you don't like Linux? You fork the project and just ignore what Linus publish in his tree. (The hard part is doing a better job than Linus and convincing enough people that you can do it.) So Linus must be nice enough to keep most people happy.
> keep most people happy.
Not _most_ in the sense of a plurality of all users. _most_ in the sense of some subset of contributors. Free software is still a dictatorship of the able. A person who cannot contribute (whether that be code or money to pay someone else to code) something important is still without recourse.
If Linus decided to add a bunch of malware to the kernel, my mom would still be unable to fix that.
FOSS is still better than proprietary, but it's not perfect either.
You are right, but your mom would easily benefit from someone else who would be able to fix that: free software relies on the fact that someone "able" is at least not looking to hurt you, which is, for a popular enough software, a given.
For software that is not popular enough, you are right that in practice, your mom wouldn't be able to do anything other than stop using the software.
But of course FOSS is not perfect, it's just a way to empower your users: nothing more, nothing less.
Edit to answer the first point: free software as a cultural movement grew out of a need to control the hardware a software engineer bought and which came with no source code for the drivers. Friends made along the way was great, and I agree that's lovely, but ultimately that's what free software enables, among other lovely things (like not depending on a manufacturer you disagree with, or another programmer you disagree with).
Forking a project does not duplicate the effort — collaboration requires a lot of effort, and the more collaborators, the more expensive it is (usually even more than 2x). This is why many well-run free software projects have their own BDFLs (Linux, Python... OK, maybe not so benevolent at all times :)).
If the two of us wanted to take a project in a different direction, and insisted on keeping it a single project, we'd have to do more work to reach compromises all the time, neither side ever being fully happy, but doing duplicate work for an imperfect result.
As you are well aware, RoI calculation is not as simple as LoC count, and typing in the code is the fast part. With two projects with clearer missions, willing contributors flock to the one they align better with, which leads to one being more stable, another being quicker to add new features.
And no, getting all of those contributors on a single project would not result in a single project that is both stable and adding new features quickly.
Obviously, no expectation on you to do anything. I just find it surprising you do not see the value in a different way to organize a community compared to what's common, even if what's valuable to you is different.
> I can't not wonder if it would be less time & energy consuming if they did it more politely?
This is an interesting question that comes up from time to time and it's actually not as it seems. While it is work and taxing at all, the whole act of explaining is actually not very expensive. In fact, it is simply tapping into the stream of consciousness and piping it into a text input.
What _would_ be expensive actions would be to:
a) _not_ explain, see that something isn't quite right and then try to handle the internal discomfort sparking from that.
b) mask and play a different "more polite" role, which actually just means "accepting the unsolicited emotional offloading and the task of handling those attached to it"
both being "providing a service" to the random person that just approached me, and operating in a style that is unnatural to me. This is counterintuitive for the vast majority of people, because for them it works exactly the other way round.
Doing this emotional labor for free would also be just giving away the thing that makes me money. Specifically, being able to understand technical details and also communicating those to people that won't necessarily do.
Effectively, the free-plan includes technical support but not emotional consulting. This, for some, is hard to understand, for others, it is hard to accept.
And, of course, it always gets worse when social media (like HN) is involved, because these machines erase any context and replace it with violently jamming in defaults + rewarding those that dunk the hardest and make the in-group of the mob feel pleasant feelings.
I get you, and I can understand how emotionally taxing it is to not do anything and "keep it in" (should have said this, could have done that, why are they not reading simple instructions... — I've spent one too many sleepless nights mostly when I wasn't behaving as myself but rather adapting to social expectation).
So I think you are completely right to set the boundaries you want to set, but perhaps you can recruit someone else in the community who doesn't get so annoyed at people not respecting others' time, because let's be honest, that's what people do (mostly because it usually works due to the social norms being what they are).
It is why some people are unapproachable and build boundaries (eg. imagine even executive assistants to executives in order to not divide their attention on every little thing).
> but perhaps you can recruit someone else in the community who doesn't get so annoyed at people not respecting others' time
No, I can't. The world, in this aspect, is wrong. It is flawed. Rotten, even. I (and actually we) cannot approach this by just accommodating what is broken.
Everyone has been doing that and you can see what damage this has done to democracy and to reality itself.
As the docs state, Valetudo is counter-culture. The definition of being that is that you will hear a steady stream of loud screaming, because culture is being countered. If this stream stops, that means that the countering also stopped.
I do not think that we can afford to let the world deteriorate even further than it has already. We need to re-learn context. No matter how painful that might turn out.
I know HN is the last place for this :D But I also didn't ask to be linked here. I did however ask to not be posted here anymore.
I also believe that Valetudo is a unique opportunity for this, because no one is being held at gunpoint and forced to use it, nor will anyone die because they can't use it. But, at the same time, it is highly-polished software that just works and offers massive amounts of value for free. You only pay with accepting that context exists and that other humans exist.
> It is why some people are unapproachable and build boundaries
This is precisely what I am doing. I would argue thought that the "unapproachable" really depends on where one is coming from.
We are getting philosophical, but I wouldn't say the "world is wrong": the world simply is.
Yes, people engage on a topic they have spent few thoughts on. But let's be honest, many who have spent many thoughts on something do not really come up with some genuinely interesting insight either. Thus I have doubts that humans as a whole can "re-learn context", and even those who can, will usually not invest enough in the topic the other side might care about.
I applaud you for your desire to "fix the world", but over time, I've learned to accept it for what it is, and I don't feel the same annoyance you seem to when I am being misunderstood even when I state things plainly (I am mostly — I admit — smugly amused, except when it's the person who can directly affect my life).
Anyway, as long as you are not overly frustrated, keep doing what you are doing (which sounds like building great free software for de-clouding robot vacuums), and fighting the fights that matter to you!
Yeah that’s fair. Personally I very very rarely use manufacturer support because it’s just very limited. And also likely limited to 2 years.
And when the software is fully offline and I control the update cycle, it’s unlikely the vacuum will just start misbehaving unless the actual hardware is damaged
Yeah, I more meant if there's a bug in Valetudo, I'm SOL since I can't contact anyone.
In theory, you can contact anyone who is willing to dive deep and fix it for you, right? Including the original authors.
Obviously, open source vacuum robots don't have a strength in numbers yet, but suddenly, they are appealing to me too.
That is the case with every FOSS software where you did not buy a support contract.
Would it help you to be able to contact me when I then say "actually, I do not care"? And then what?
Someone else had the same problem and helps, the way I help other people with their problems.
You seem to be saying that OSS communities don't help, which is obviously not true. I'm a member of many OSS communities where users help each other, and that's a core part of why I prefer OSS projects.
This doesn't happen when you ban most people.
> you ban most people.
I do not ban most people as so much that I ban people that did not read and act according to the rules of the space. Which does turn out to be "most people" when you look at an unfiltered set of all humanity, because the ideology of the space is rather far away from that baseline. That is on purpose though and clearly explained many times in the documentation.
The "Why not Valetudo?" page is a good start. The "FAQ" also houses some info. Code of Conduct, obviously and the Contributing.md too.
The information is out there and I did try my best to make it comprehensible and coherent. Most people that get banned usually get banned because they did not read the information first but instead showed up with defaults.
Your reasons are your own, but that doesn't change my point above. For me, an OSS project without a strong community looks about as bad as the original manufacturer software, with all the phoning home and other disadvantages that entails.
Oh, yes, absolutely.
I am not in any way challenging that. That is the correct Take-away. Genuinely.
As said, the culture is different. I do not intend to convince you that my project would be better than what the vendor can offer. In fact, you have correctly pointed out that in your situation, the vendor might actually offer the _better_ experience with actual paid support.
>I think this thread went a bit off-topic with heavy discussions about the community or developer.
Not off topic at all but extremely relevant.
Not sure how this is off-topic, software and community go hand in hand. Despite the focus on community, there is still a healthy emphasis on the software part (and many compliments lol).
Clicking on the link to valetudo.cloud redirects me to hn, but typing the address not. Seems to confirm messages complaining about the projects community/leaders....
Yea HN is notoriously toxic to OSS projects, no wonder that many don’t want traffic from here
One thing that amuses me is that this could mean "health" (in Latin) or "anything goes" (in Portuguese; normally two words). They're actually from the same root (valeo, 'to be well, to be OK, to be valid'; I think the oldest meaning is 'to be strong'), then with the Latin suffix -tudo (like our -tude, meaning the state or condition of being a certain way), or the separate Portuguese word tudo 'everything' (originally from Latin totum, meaning 'all, entire').
So, the Latin one is like "OK-ness", and the Portuguese one is like "everything is OK" (here in the more modern sense of being allowed, rather than the older sense of being in good condition).
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/valetudo
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vale-tudo
The Roman goddess of Hygiene (Hygieia in Greek Mythology) is named "Valetudo."
I (and probably many others) more closely associate the term with Brazilian no-holds-barred fighting matches called Vale Tudo.
So the name is actually genius! You get into valetudo expecting hygiene and wellness but as you encounter the community you discover it's actually about intense fighting.
Can't recommend this project enough. I've set this up for myself and multiple people that saw mine and wanted a de-clouded vacuum robot and they all love it. Several L10s Ultras and an X40 Ultra. Takes a bit of effort (and a dongle if you want to keep things as simple as possible) but I wouldn't have one of these things running around the house any other way. Haven't tried reaching out to the community, so can't speak to that, but I'm really grateful that people put this type of effort into projects like this. Same goes for e.g. NetGuard (Android firewall) - not sure I'd every comfortably have an Android phone without a tool like that.
I believe that Roborock is no longer actively supported so if you want one of these, get one of the Dreame models listed on the site. Dreame sells refurbished units on Ebay for a pretty steep discount (L10S for as low as ~$200 with a warranty that I believe this doesn't void if you don't brick it) and that's what all of my purchases have been. Just make sure the one you're getting is listed on the site (Pro vs non-Pro, 1 vs 2, etc.) since only very specific models are supported.
I have two valetudo compatible L10s. Where did you source your dongle?
It is easy enough to source the parts and do it yourself and solder them together as the site descriptions, but I was lazy and bought from tindie (https://www.tindie.com/products/scacht/dreame-pcb-breakout-f...)
Thanks.
Been running this for years. Absolutely fantastic, my vacuum has never touched the "cloud" and yet I can still run it remotely (or with "smart" run automations) via Homeassistant.
It's the way IOT should be
Adding to the praise of "it just works". My Dreame L10S Ultra was straightforward to root after getting the breakout PCBs required. Now it only talks to NTP and the update server when I remember to check for updates every few months.
You happen to have links for those or is it straightforward enough to just take the first search result? Would love to stop mine from spying.
I don't have any links for assembled boards, but there seem to be some available [1]. You can find the PCB files here [2] including more documentation. The same page also has a Telegram group link to find people near you who might be able to help out.
I got my PCBs made via JLCPCB, but there are other options as well. Pay attention to select the correct PCB thickness, noted in the Readme. I fell into that trap and had to order again. Sourcing the USB port with the correct footprint was a bit annoying, I just ended up ordering a selection of kits with multiple variants from Aliexpress.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45699184
[2] https://github.com/Hypfer/valetudo-dreameadapter
Double check your vacuum model. I transformed my vacuum into a neat (well, not really) pile of parts in about an hour only to find mine isn't supported. Apparently S7 MaxV Ultra is a completely different PCB and SoC than the supported S7 variants (S7/S7 Pro Ultra). At least I cleaned it while disassembling, so it wasn't a total loss :)
I briefly considered connecting an ESPHome module to the 'start' button so that I could at least start cleaning from Home Assistant, but since it still won't give me errors if there are any, that seems like a half assed thing to do..
I think there's an actual Roborock integration for HA. I forget if it's official or on HACS, but I've used it and it worked well at the time. It requires cloud, which obviously isn't ideal, but better than nothing IMO.
It's integrated into HA now as a core component, and it's not cloud it's a local (polling) integration. https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/roborock/
But according to the FAQ, the vacuums still dont work when they are offline, as they will turn reset their wifi until they are online again.
> When the vacuum is disconnected from the internet, it will attempt to disconnect itself from Wi-Fi and reconnect itself until it can reach the Roborock servers.
Yep it's an important distinction -- the vacuum itself depends on the cloud, but the integration in Home Assistant does not.
Yeah, that’s exactly what happens if I don’t add an exception for it to my iot vlan - it keeps reconnecting to WiFi. Scheduled cleaning doesn’t work without internet either..
I guess I’m not buying the next vacuum until I’m 100% sure it works offline and supports Matter or something..
Personally, Im currently looking at the switchbot vacuums.
They recently started working with Home Assistant with their "Works with" program.
Not 100% sure what the status of each robot is though.
Related. Others?
Valetudo – Cloud replacement for vacuum robots enabling local-only operation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38788326 - Dec 2023 (154 comments)
Valetudo – Free your vacuum cleaner from the cloud - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34287116 - Jan 2023 (45 comments)
Valetudo: Open-source cloud replacement for vacuum robots - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31665872 - June 2022 (89 comments)
Open Source privacy-friendly firmware replacement for Robot Vacuums (ie Roombas) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29308273 - Nov 2021 (1 comment)
Valetudo is a cloud-free web interface for robot vacuum cleaners - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25856788 - Jan 2021 (20 comments)
It's really shameful that the tech gods (i.e. us) have made it almost impossible to have useful technology that does our bidding without first signing over our privacy and sometimes our very personhood.
It is unfortunate.
I think one must have a chat with our gods of capital in order to correct it. But I'm not sure they are listening.
Wealth is imaginary to a certain extent. Nonfungible certainly.
And sometimes when AWS is down you have a nice electric brick instead of useful device. Totally bonkers.
Valetudo is really nice software, but I have a bad taste in my mouth from the community.
I went to the Telegram channel to ask something about why my vacuum running Valetudo would have a specific behaviour (IIRC it moved on its own), they kind of talked to each other for a second to discuss if this question was relevant to the channel, and then, presumably deciding it wasn't, banned me for a year.
Yeah, I’ve never seen a community more off-putting than this one. I’m thankful for it, it works on my robot, but I wouldn’t help or participate in any way. But it’s like they don’t want help or be a community like mentioned in their docs. In contrast, for example, https://github.com/Koenkk/zigbee2mqtt was such a welcoming community.
> This project is the hobby of some random guy on the internet. There is no intent to commercialize it, grow it or expand the target audience of it. In fact, there is intent to explicitly not do that.
Then it begs the question of why they even publicize the Telegram chat. I guess it’s for contributors only, not a support chat.
Totally second that, I was banned today on their Telegram channel just because I mentioned that I recorded a r2con2025 presentation to free Samsung PowerBot VR7000M vacuum cleaners (no Samsung bot seems to be supported by them to date), titled "Restoring the Vacuum" in here:
https://radare.org/con/2025/#vacuum
I wish I didn't mention Valetudo positively on my presentation now. Hypfer has bizarre (to say the least) views about what community building means and entails.
Oh, see, I actually wish I was part of a community that would have flagged this to me. Maybe there is? Regardless, thank you for sharing, I'll be watching this :)
[flagged]
Why are you talking about business? What about this relates to business?
Obviously the thought was that the content was interesting to the people that would be interested in this software because it's about rooting vacuums and taking control of them.
It's nice to get your reply here so I can see what the community is like myself.
Can't speak for Hypfer but I guess he doesn't mean the monetary side of "business" as most people understand it but the "attention" (of reading/checking the talk and link, etc..), so I don't fault him for that.
Full disclosure: I'm not getting paid nor seek money from what I found on my alleged "ad", btw.
Business in this case means a clear transactional mindset. And you do get paid, just not in cash. You push your brand, your credibility as a security researcher and all that. You earn social credits and reputation.
And that is why you tried to hook people to watch your talk.
I bet the talk is good. Great, even. But this (maybe even not conscious) transactionality just does not belong in that space. HN, for example, is a much better place for it.
> And that is why you tried to hook people to watch your talk.
Hook people? Hey, it's not *THAT* good of a talk. I'm not even a security researcher myself, but thanks for the street cred ;)
I see your points, let's agree to disagree on some of them but overall, thanks for sharing your thoughts over here, good intellectual sparring.
> And you do get paid, just not in cash.
> And that is why you tried to hook people to watch your talk.
I gotta wonder if whoever you banned really deserves this. I think there's a world of difference between an individual just sharing something they worked on and a corporation spamming your channel for profit.
Sure, but the action is still incorrect and that's why the reaction was removal.
Deserving sounds like a punishment, but it's just action => reaction. Attendance privilege was misused so it was revoked for a while.
I get where you're coming from, but the question there always ends up "where is the line?"
The answer in this case makes it simple. The line is crossed the moment transactional self-promotion happens.
No surprises for anyone. No discussions about which groups might be allowed to do so and why. A simple "no transactionality full stop".
Btw, most bans in my space expire after a while, because I do believe that people can and will change, but, as per the CoC, there is also another way to appeal a ban.
> The line is crossed the moment transactional self-promotion happens.
I understand where you're coming from now. I was confused at first because I make a conscious effort to differentiate this from commercial advertising.
I think it's only natural for people to want to share their work with peers. I agree that sites such as this one are the appropriate places for posting such things. I just hesitate before calling it advertising which has much darker connotations.
Is this entire account just performance art?
"I Pretended To Be The Most Insufferable Maintainer in Open Source and Everyone Hated Me For It"?
Yes. I am not a real person.
In fact, no one but yourself is. You are the hero here. You see through it all. Thank you, hero, for finding that out and saving the city.
You win +37XP
If I donate $100 to your ko-fi will you stop bullying me?
ngl that's a good answer.
You've nailed it. It is clearly deliberate but also could be the result of a markov chain and it sits right in the middle.
I like that. Good art, thanks.
I posted the exact model name & number and there's indeed quite a lot of hardware specs detailed on the talk itself (Allwinner A20 SoC, btw) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"There was no relation to Valetudo"... well, with your current behavior and tone as a community "admin", you're certainly making sure I'll not work on that direction in the near future (I do have it mentioned as future aim on my last slides).
> and there's indeed quite a lot of hardware specs detailed on the talk itself
Not in what you posted though, nor in the link you posted.
> well, with your current behavior and tone as a community "admin", you're certainly making sure I'll not work on that direction in the near future
Not just with that, but also with the Contributing.md in the repository clearly and unmistakably stating that this is not wanted nor needed.
Yeah, they seem pretty clueless. Right now they're doing the classic 302 back to Hacker News when you visit with an HN referrer. So they appear to have this extremely unnuanced approach to wielding power where they just block people with minimal reasoning.
I used to focus always on the tech. Now I focus on the people. No time for this kind of behavior.
That’s rough but also a tiny bit funny
It is a very typical experience for folks asking questions in the telegram group.
https://www.reddit.com/r/valetudorobotusers/comments/1lmz85n...
That's horrible. Matches the vibe I got by reading the project pages though, felt tiring just trying to get to 'what is this project'.
Yeah its sorta hilarious that someone has taken a "make my life simple and easy" technology to the extreme of "if you don't solder your own breakout board you should get off my lawn".
I'm hoping to sidestep the drama and just enjoy the software.
When you’re two days and one solder in, you’ll need an answer from someone, and you know exactly you’re in for a ride now… been there, done that
And this is why I like LLMs, they hardly ever bark at you...
Wow that's a sublime example of weapons grade autism on display with full self awareness.
Ah, thanks. Now I know to stay way the fuck away from this project
Damn. Those comments are damning.
This makes me want to flash mob them and see how many people we can get banned for how many funny reasons
The main developer is toxic af, and the community behavior reflects that.
Between this and grapheneOS, it seems everyone developing privacy software is borderline schizophrenic.
There was no need to bring GrapheneOS into this discussion, refrain from personal attacks please.
How is bringing GrapheneOS in personal?
Legit question, from a clueless person. Please be gentle! :)
Calling a person schizophrenic publicly is an insult, especially in an unrelated debate.
Because the gp comment is not about grapheneos, but its creator and could be taken as insulting (considering none of them is likely to be actually schizophrene).
I thoroughly disagree. On the surface, his behavior may seem very similar to the behavior exhibited by toxic people, but once you understand his reasoning, I find it makea perfect sense.
To summarize and paraphrase: the project is his personal garden. It's by him, for him. But he has also decided to open that garden to any random stranger on the internet, free of charge. In a lot of similar projects, that means an invitation is extended to plant stuff in the garden or to suggest that certain plants are moved. He wants to make it clear that that's not the case in his garden. If you wanna plant, you're free to freely and instantly duplicate his garden and get cracking. But he will not be planting your plants in his.
Since people struggle to accept this, he's taken on a harsher-than-normal tone. That's understandable to me.
You're just making excuses and ignoring the problem.
The problem is being verbally abusive towards people with no ill intent of any kind is unacceptable in ALL circumstances. No exceptions. You can refuse requests and ban whoever from your chatroom, that is his right.
You don't get the right to abuse and mock and harass people. Ever. Assuming that you do makes you a toxic asshole.
It's all very cut and dry. There's not really a gray area here. You either treat people with dignity or you're an asshole. Insisting that this kind of behavior is ever acceptable or excusable just means that you're also an asshole and looking for ways to rationalize and justify your own behavior.
> You either treat people with dignity or you're an asshole.
I don’t think you need to treat people with dignity that don’t treat you with dignity.
There is - as always - a bunch of grey area.
You don’t need to be tolerant towards people that don’t practice tolerance themselves.
Doing so would untermine the whole basis that allows you to be tolerant.
I don’t know anything about this particular case though
If this was the case, why have a public telegram group then? Why ridicule members and air drama?
Sounds more like a fetish basement than a garden to me.
> If this was the case, why have a public telegram group then?
I recently set up my first Valetudo robot, and therefore thoroughly read the documentation multiple times. In it, he comes across as genuinely wanting to help people succeed running Valetudo. I assume that's the reason for the group chat. At the same time, he also very very much does not want to give people the illusion that they can demand anything from him. The fear that people will is not unfounded. Think of what happens in any moderately popular FOSS project. He's just opting out of all that, in no uncertain terms.
> Sounds more like a fetish basement than a garden to me.
Fine. So he's made a fetish basement, and he's letting others use it for free. He wants to make sure that nobody demands, or even suggests, he change his basement to accommodate their fetishes.
Happy?
There's a way to do all that without being an arsehole.
Also putting an open source project out there doesn't absolve you of all social obligations simply because it's free. You can't say "well you are free to not use it, then it doesn't affect you at all" because that isn't true. By making and publicising this project he is actively discouraging other similar projects from happening - ones that might have less toxic leaders.
I should write a blog post about that because it seems to be an extremely common misconception.
putting an open source project out there doesn’t entail _any_ social obligations actually.
I can imagine the author took abuse from some extremely entitled people for some time and then just snapped.
If you ever ran any moderately successful oss project you get dozens of these people all the time; they demand your time, work, and attention and screech, complain, and blackmail you if you don’t instantly succumb to their demands.
It’s the one thing that always turned me off from doing oss more seriously; users are just the worst.
Of course only a small fraction of users but if you have many users it’s a never ending flood
> Also putting an open source project out there doesn't absolve you of all social obligations simply because it's free.
If I understand the guy correctly, he doesn't think that sharing software that he wrote comes with any obligations once he's sufficiently informed the recipients about damage it may cause. I agree with him.
I don't. Not morally anyway. By sharing it he's ensuring that no other less toxic projects can flourish (at least not as easily). That comes with some moral obligation not to be a complete dick.
The toxicity is not about accepting contributions. I have zero issues with this, the project is, as you said, his personal garden. But the behavior in chats is absolutely toxic.
If you put out a sign "come listen to my music" and then throw out every second person, everyone wearing blue and every blonde with no warning, that is toxic. It is your play, but you are not treating people coming in with respect. My 2c.
That is an explanation not a justification. Toxic is toxic.
No. There is 0 reason to be toxic or an asshat in general. It should not be accepted. He might have reasons to be protective, but one can do that in a respectful manner. But going around, making something up, banning people for asking or criticizing is not the way to go.
Once you make something public it's not a private garden anymore.
> No. There is 0 reason to be toxic or an asshat in general. It should not be accepted.
So, you wanna shame or force him into accepting contributions? That's ridiculous!
> Once you make something public it's not a private garden anymore.
Wait, are you saying if I have an actual garden that I myself own and maintain, and I let random people from the street come see it between noon and five every Sunday, it's no longer my private garsden? Then you and I are on different planets in this debate.
You forgot to quote the part where I said he can refuse in a normal and respectable way.
If you make a garden and then declare it a public garden then yes. If you want people to not step on your flowers you can tell them in a normal way. No need to shout around, belittle them, and ban them from your garden for a year....
He could have just kept his Project private if he doesn't want people to interact. Simple as that.
> If you make a garden and then declare it a public garden then yes.
He didn't. He made a garden, declared it private, and set specific terms under which you and I and others can come enjoy it. Take it or leave it.
> No need to shout around, belittle them, and ban them from your garden for a year....
Then follow his rules, or don't go to his garden! He's offering you a free favor. Take it or leave it.
> He could have just kept his Project private if he doesn't want people to interact. Simple as that.
Of course he could have. However, I'm adamant that those of us who find Valetudo useful – i.e. find his garden beautiful – would be worse off for it. Why would you want the overall usefulness given to the world to decrease? What's the benefit? Not feeling annoyed that he won't let you help?
They didn't say either of those things. What they said is that you can say no and not accept contributions without being a toxic asshat.
You can do it the first couple thousand times. After that it just becomes harder and harder to be sociable.
Would you still be so nice after doing it the ten thousandth time?
See, this is what I don't understand about this type of developer.
When you publish an OSS project, it is an implicit invitation for collaboration, and for being part of a community around shared interests where everyone benefits. That is the entire point of F/LOSS.
Yet I've heard many people, on here, in fact, arguing against that idea. That publishing free software but not accepting feedback, contributions, or providing support, still counts as OSS. And, technically, that may be the case if you consider OSS to only be about the license itself. If you take license terms like "THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND" as the only literal definition of what OSS is. When, in fact, it is, and can be, so much more than that.
People who think like this are doing themselves and their software a disservice. Software is better when it is worked on as a community effort, much like a garden. An individual might have good ideas, and be able to execute them well, but they're not omniscient nor omnipotent.
If Linus Torvalds had published Linux as his "personal garden", it would have never been even remotely as good and popular as it is today. It would have probably been another niche project in the footnotes of history.
> When you publish an OSS project, it is an implicit invitation for collaboration, and for being part of a community around shared interests where everyone benefits. That is the entire point of F/LOSS.
There is no one single "entire point of F/LOSS". Even in the struggle to name it (free software vs open source software), the desire and intent is obviously different.
Sometimes people build something and publish it because they are OK if someone else makes something else out of it, extends it or whatever... But they don't want to be bothered about it anymore.
Running a community around a free software project indicates desire to collaborate on something, but even that does not indicate a desire to collaborate on everything this project could become (imagine someone coming in with a desire to port it to robot mowers — sure, it sounds related, but the author might not have any interest in it if they are living in an apartment, and they don't want to spread their limited time and energy on maintaining something they will never be able to test/support themselves).
> Sometimes people build something and publish it because they are OK if someone else makes something else out of it, extends it or whatever... But they don't want to be bothered about it anymore.
I understand that. My argument is that that mentality is doing the project a disservice. For every person the author might find difficult to collaborate with, there will be many others who will contribute positive input and changes to the project. By not being open to collaboration, someone else will step in and build that community instead, given that the software is actually good. And that's fine, it's their prerogative, but chances are that their closed-but-technically-open project will languish in comparison to the project that's actually open and invites collaboration.
So, really, I don't see what they gain from releasing it as open source in the first place. Personal satisfaction from thinking they're helping others by providing code only? Building their personal portfolio or brand? For demonstration purposes? I honestly find it puzzling.
> Running a community around a free software project indicates desire to collaborate on something, but even that does not indicate a desire to collaborate on everything this project could become
And that's fine as well. No project will satisfy the use cases of everyone. The line has to be drawn at some point, and this should be made clear. Upstream code contributions often add additional maintenance burden to core developers, since the contributor will likely disappear once their code is merged. Forking is always an option when visions don't align. I get all that.
But it's one thing to have a clear focus for the project, and another to make it completely closed to contributions. Or to have this confusing in-between state where you have a website to promote the project, provide user documentation and places for community discussion, but then alienate your users by being hostile, not open to feedback, etc. It sends mixed signals to anyone interested in the project and willing to give their time and energy to improve it.
This is why I strongly believe that OSS only works when there is an environment of mutual good will, respect, and collaboration that allows a community to thrive. This is not encoded in any legal frameworks or licenses because it doesn't need to be. It should be common sense that the alternatives lead to everything OSS is opposed to: less freedoms for users, and proprietary software that benefits only a select few.
> I understand that. My argument is that that mentality is doing the project a disservice.
In the world where we accept unfinished software all around us, from government and banking services, to our daily general computing devices like computers and phones, to appliances like TVs, washing machines or elevators, the project seems to be doing great for many a user: we've heard accounts here from people putting the software on their device once years ago and forgetting about it — it just works.
Their focus seems to be exactly that: ensure this project works for them, and allow a select few trusted partners to make it work for their own equipment too. But work it must.
I might have a different perspective on making software and evolving it, but that does not make this perspective any less valuable — it's actually great to have it out there in the world.
> For every person the author might find difficult to collaborate with, there will be many others who will contribute positive input and changes to the project. By not being open to collaboration, someone else will step in and build that community instead, given that the software is actually good. And that's fine, it's their prerogative, but chances are that their closed-but-technically-open project will languish in comparison to the project that's actually open and invites collaboration.
The project has been there for years now, and this hasn't happened. Either there aren't "many" who'd "contribute positive input and changes", or the issues with the project management aren't as big as some are making it seem here.
> So, really, I don't see what they gain from releasing it as open source in the first place.
They don't have to gain anything: they publish it because they don't mind it, not looking for any gain.
> This is not encoded in any legal frameworks or licenses...
Many companies have nothing to lose if they released their IoT device firmware as open source, but they have nothing to gain either, so they don't do it. I'd much prefer it if they released it, even if for the most part, I wouldn't touch it.
But I'd feel the sense of trust that this device is never dying on me, even if a company does.
So I disagree: a free software license is enough to "encode" all that you seek! Just by having access to the source code, and rights to modify and distribute it, anyone can decide to build a different community, evolve a product in a different direction, or change it to have a new technical foundation.
When this need becomes strong enough, it will simply happen: for better or for worse. See eg. LibreOffice vs OpenOffice case. Or the cdrtools maintainer frustration with Debian/Ubuntu forks (https://cdrtools.sourceforge.net/private/linux-dist.html).
respect boundaries, most ppl sharing code with you aren’t looking for a relationship
> See, this is what I don't understand about this type of developer.
That's ok. It's ok to be different. I'm probably more like you for my own projects, but that doesn't invalidate this guy's stance.
> When you publish an OSS project, it is an implicit invitation for collaboration, and for being part of a community around shared interests where everyone benefits.
It is not.
> That is the entire point of F/LOSS.
If it were, don't you think that part would be written into at least one popular FLOSS license?
> People who think like this are doing themselves and their software a disservice. Software is better when it is worked on as a community effort, much like a garden. An individual might have good ideas, and be able to execute them well, but they're not omniscient nor omnipotent.
Who are you to decide for another person? Can I decide such things about your actual garden?
> If Linus Torvalds had published Linux as his "personal garden", it would have never been even remotely as good and popular as it is today. It would have probably been another niche project in the footnotes of history.
I'm glad he didn't. But if he had, do you really think that shaming or pressuring him into doing it differently would have in any way made him feel like continuing? Linux would have died.
From their website:
> Contrary to common expectations when it comes to software released under a FOSS-like license, Valetudo is not a community-driven project; nor does it even have a community in that sense.
And I witnessed similar, very unfriendly interactions.
Heaven forbid you go there simply to praise the project. The last guy to do that got a 2 year ban and many, many paragraphs of irrelevant pseudo intellectial nonsense from the maintainer.
Not going to paste the message directly - but it happened five days ago and was along the lines of "thank you for breathing new life into my robot which was otherwise destined for landfill".
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A few years back I wanted multifloor on my Valetudo (I had a weird single room which had a step into it) so I did my research and found a whole bunch of toxicity around this feature, mixed in with a bunch of information which mostly answered my questions (it wasn't supported, which of course I was fine with, because it's not my project and I was just grateful for being able to use it). I figured "oh, this would be useful to document", popped onto the Telegram and asked a few clarifying questions, saying I intended to contribute to the docs.
First I was accused of not reading the docs (I had, they were confusing and incomplete), then I was accused of trying to sneak multi-floor into the product (..what), then I was accused of being a "well-off boomer who wanted him to do extra work because I wouldn't spring for a third vacuum" (I WASN'T ADVOCATING FOR MULTI-FLOOR). So I backed off and watched for a bit, then landed up leaving.
I have no desire to force change on the man (it's his garden after all); ultimately, GitHub was the wrong destination for his work. It's sort-of like he's opened a workshop in the middle of a bustling market and now he's barking at everyone for interupting him.
Recently an error popped up in Home Assistant, so I hazarded a look at the issue tracker to find he'd closed an issue and banned a well-regarded Home Assistant community member for opening it: https://github.com/Hypfer/Valetudo/issues/2310
Wow, that issue is illuminating. A simple heads up leading to a multi-page meltdown against an individual he banned. It was even pinned in the repo at one point.
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I feel a bit honoured that I got a response within 3 minutes …
But I also feel a bit weird because I was trying to support your way of running your community. So yeah, I was trying to do a balanced take on why Valetudo is good despite some people having a bad experience with the telegram channel.
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Dude if you have a whole thread of people you have all these problems with, maybe it's you?
> I have no desire to force change on the man (it's his garden after all); ultimately, GitHub was the wrong destination for his work. It's sort-of like he's opened a workshop in the middle of a bustling market and now he's barking at everyone for interupting him.
^ This ^
My understanding is that you unbanned me but I was too lazy to rejoin. Perhaps this has changed?
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I actually have no idea who Hajo is. If they’ve been annoying in the past, and you banned them for it, it’s not really my place to figure out whether they deserved it. I only replied because yelling about it here is a sure fire way to get your comment flagged. Maybe you don’t mind but I felt that, spending far too much time here and watching a bunch of people do this repeatedly even though it’s against the rules, I might as well send people a reminder that there’s another option.
As for your Telegram chat: I actually genuinely do not care, and I mean this without trying to be smug or anything. I joined to ask about S8 stuff and eventually just met Dennis directly. Ironically both of us seem to have gotten too busy with work to actually get to a good solution for those and I never actually ended up installing Valetudo anyway. My friends occasionally tell me how great it is and I feel a little but of regret for not following up to get the exploit stable but I just put up with letting my vacuum do its thing without any of the smart features :( But yeah, I really don’t think I would have gotten any value from rejoining the chat so I didn’t. I’m actually kind of sorry I participated in the conversation I did, not really because I wouldn’t stand behind what I said but more that it was kind of a waste of time and low value to even respond. And clearly it made you upset, so considering I valued it at effectively zero and you definitely felt it was negative, I think the conclusion is pretty obvious.
One thing I do want to say, though: I feel like you frequently run into your project just causing you misery. I work on FOSS too, and arguably I work in a similar hacking-ish space too where random people show up and beg you for support, who don’t really bother to read the rules, etc. I get that this is frustrating. I ban plenty of people who drag down the place too. But I think that your garden that you’re trying to make might actually be causing you more trouble than it might be worth. I don’t wake up feeling drained that I have to interact with the community, in fact I actually appreciate talking to many of the members even if they can be annoying sometimes. I’ve had people occasionally claim they were unfairly treated (usually I disagree, of course) but I think the sentiment is largely positive. So, like, I just want to point out that it’s possible to enjoy what you do; it can be nice even if sometimes frustrated people show up. I just don’t want you to hate working on the things you’re doing.
I have yet to see anyone attack you, here or in any of the links people have provided. I don't know all the history of your interactions with these people, but it feels like you are playing the victim without cause.
The docs say "search before asking"...did you do that? Maybe it's a well known issue they're tired of responding to.
Well, given that they had to discuss among themselves whether the question was relevant or not, I'll guess that it wasn't a well-known issue.
Even if it were, I wouldn't ban people for a year in my community, I'd simply have an "RTFM" bot response.
You were not worthy of consorting with the council of wizards.
In all seriousness though, I didn't need to search too hard to find numerous other testimonies of the project author acting neurotically. I'm not sure you missed out on much. Someone on Reddit mentioned being banned after joining the Telegram group for a similar question only a week ago.
Yeah, it seems that way. Ah well, it's his project, I see the ban as saving me time and aggravation.
>Valetudo is not a community
>Contrary to common expectations when it comes to software released under a FOSS-like license, Valetudo is not a community-driven project; nor does it even have a community in that sense.
How can someone ban someone from a community if it doesn't have one.
Saying it doesn't have a community doesn't magically make it true. There are people in that Telegram channel who talk to each other about the software, which is what a community is.
It's still a very harsh response.
I cannot stress this enough
It especially pisses off the noobs, because, frankly, they are noobs! They didn't even know what to search for yet! They're learning. Search is still a hard problem. Get a few words wrong and you'll get nothing of value. Worse, it'll lead you to lots of irrelevant information you don't yet know is irrelevant.The worst part is when it's claimed it's been discussed and no link is provided. If you know it's been discussed, prove it with a reply with the link, then move on. At worst you have made the issue easier to find. At best the issue isn't actually related and you've gained clarifying context.
But banning is just a silly response that's clearly going to enrage people. Are you building a community to work together or a community to circle jerk?
At least when Linus yells at people he explains to them what the issue is.
If they spend time handholding 1000s of lazy people not willing to do basic search provide logs etc before helping they would spend all their time handholding instead of working on the software they are coding in their spare time as a hobby.
As much as I personally do not like the abrasiveness from many open source devs I empathize with their behaviour as most people are not willing to do the slightest work to help themselves and just expect to be hand fed. And this abrasiveness usually comes after years of trying to be helpful.
Btw if you asked a question then got an answer and figured it out hopefully you would have added it to the help notes of the open source software you are using so others would find it
But not in communities I get banned from for not finding the (supposedly) previously discussed issue. They won't let me.
Seems to redirect back to HN now when you visit it from HN? Still glad it was mentioned here. Have been pondering buying a vacuum robot for a while and the missing privacy was off putting, so I haven't bought one yet, and I only today learnt of the project.
Can somebody who runs this on one of the recommended Dreame mopping robots say from experience whether you actually lose some kind of essential features the built-in firmwares have? The "why not" page says feature parity is a non-goal but only specifically mentions multifloor where I can understand the reasoning.
Any backstory to this or is the developer just not a fan?
The comments here seem to prove him right. Half of them are airing their personal grievances or talking generically about what it means to have a community.
HN frontpage posts also have a way to get the attention of some pretty shitty people, directly or indirectly. HN itself takes active steps so site operators cannot detect when someone is coming from HN or not (like adding noreferrer to links to some domains) so the admins here are aware of the problem and decide to go against linked authors' wishes.
You won’t miss much. The only thing I am missing is the mop after vacuum functionality, which was kinda borked and eventually removed in Valetudo for my specific model (Dreame L10s pro ultra heat)
I recently got an “older” generation robot vacuum for this reason. I wish the dreame debug board was more accessible. The designer and creator purposely made it this way so people would learn how to solder. I could solder but I no longer have the time or patience to source my own PCB and parts. Thankfully, someone sells one premade on Tindie.
The overall "I want you to have a project, not a product" vibe put me off using this when deciding what robot to buy. I want a clean floor, not another hobby that turns into a chore at the least opportune moment.
Luckily, someone explained to me that in practice once you've set up, it usually just works, and it runs completely on the robot (i.e. no second device/server/homelab that you'd have to maintain) and since updates are optional, you shouldn't be required to deal with it unless you want to.
(The offputting statements are at https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/why-not-valetudo.html: "it is very much not [a product]. [...] Instead, it is highly idealistic, anti-consumerism, anti-hypergrowth and anti just-continuing-what-we-do-now. [...] these aspects are baked into its design. There is no way of using it without being constantly confronted with them. If you’re not willing to reflect, introspect, grow and most importantly stop, you will not be happy with Valetudo.", plus this "not selling PCBs out of principle so people have to source and solder themselves" - I can solder, but I prefer to delegate boring, efficiently automatable tasks to robots in a factory and would much rather pay someone 10 bucks for a finished board than pay more for the shipping of individual parts and end up with 4 extra unpopulated PCBs that I have zero use for.)
Ew.
I wholly agree with the anti-closed vibe. I even run Valetudo on my roborock. But lol I just want to control my vacuum cleaner locally and that's it. I haven't updated mine for years exactly because I just want shit to work and not have to be constantly fixing things and "be confronted".
There are IM groups where folks mail around breakout boards. There is, AFAIK, no point to the board after the inital rooting.
Yeah I just found someone on reddit who no longer needed their breakout board, so I sent them a shipping label and that was that.
(/r/valetudousers)
> Valetudo is a garden
> This project is the hobby of some random guy on the internet. There is no intent to commercialize it, grow it or expand the target audience of it. In fact, there is intent to explicitly not do that.
> Think of Valetudo as a privately-owned public garden. You can visit it any time for free and enjoy it. You can spend time there, and you can bring an infinite amount of friends with you to enjoy it. You can walk the pathways built there. You can sit on some patch of grass and maybe watch a Duck or something. You can leave a tip in the tip jar at the entrance if you really enjoy it and want to support it flourish.
> You can take inspiration from it and bring that home to your own garden, giving it a personal twist and adapting it as needed. You can even make friendly suggestions if you have a really good idea that ties into the vision that is already there.
> But, at the end of the day, you must understand that it is still privately-owned. You’re on someone else’s property over which you have no power at all. You will have to show the necessary respect. And - most importantly - you need to understand that letting you into this garden is a gift and should be treated as such.
> If you don’t like this garden because you don’t like how it’s structured, or you feel like it’s missing something, or maybe I choose the wrong flowers to plant over there that’s fine. It’s just not for you then. You can leave at any time.
>There is simply no ground to stand on to demand change to the garden. It doesn’t matter if it would attract more people or if all the other gardens in town are doing something in a specific way. It doesn’t matter if your idea of what gardens even are differs. This at the end of the day is simply private property with free public access as a gift to everyone.
> When it comes to software development, everyone has access to infinite plots of undeveloped land that they can claim at any time. Therefore, a garden being build with a specific vision does not take away the ability for anyone else to build their own garden with a different vision.
Bravo.
Sounds nice until you read people's experience with trying to discuss anything about the project (see alien site links in a thread above).
I think "discuss" is actually an interesting and probably accidentally specific (and correct) choice of word here.
If you look up the definition, you find
> to talk about a subject with someone and tell each other your ideas or opinions
> to talk or write about a subject in detail, especially considering different ideas and opinions related to it
In contrast, the garden text:
> You can take inspiration from it and bring that home to your own garden, giving it a personal twist and adapting it as needed. You can even make friendly suggestions if you have a really good idea that ties into the vision that is already there.
There are more gems. I particularly like the ‘Valetudo is not a community’ section under ‘Why NOT Valetudo‘
It's a great analogy.
People seem to apply different rules of decorum interacting with "free" software that they wouldn't apply anywhere else.
Is it the internet aspect that makes it so? Or the ease of feedback to the creator?
I don't know, but it has become very obvious that what worked in the smaller "high trust" internet, doesn't work as well for a lot of people now.
LOVE IT! Valetudo is a fake cloud that lives as a parasite in a robot's brain (running on Ubuntu!) and hijacks the original comms.
It provides ssh access, very nice control app, MQTT support and other things.
I installed it on my very old Roborock many years ago and it just works. Never had a single issue.
This software and the hacking scene around it are amazing!
I’ve got a Dreame L10s Ultra based on the compatibly guide. Joined my local Telegram group, grabbed a USB board, and the same day was interfacing with the vacuum’s Android OS. Once I started SSHing in to upload custom sounds, I couldn’t stop. Way easier than I expected.
Haha yeah that's exactly what I did with my roborock as soon as I rooted it. The voice sentence "Going back to the dock" had such a weird accent that I immediately replaced it. So awesome to be able to do that with a device you own.
I wish I could use this but last I checked, every supported robot used consumables for cleaning (like vacuum bags). My current vacuum robot uses no bags and has washable filters so nothing gets consumed. Turns out that was more important to me than local-only operation.
On the subject of bags vs cyclone collectors, My mother hates the cyclone collectors with a passion. and a disposable bag was item number one on her list of features when we were looking for a replacement vacuum for her.
I had never considered the subject before and sort of naively assumed that because the cyclone collectors were newer they were better. But she does not like cleaning them out and would rather have a bag so the whole thing can be disposed of neatly.
My roborock S5 does not use consumables and works perfectly with this. It’s even installable OTA.
I had a hard time parsing the title at first. I was like “I’m pretty sure vacuum robots have to be locally deployed”
Never heard of this before, what a great project! I wish my Roborock QV 35A was supported. Still considering sponsoring the project though, because what a great initiative it is!
I'd check some of the comments around the creator's behaviour before donating any money to them.
The author attitude towards annoying consumers is also hilarious.
If you buy your vacuum in china it’s about half price, but it’s geolocked to the mainland. There’s some dodgy looking Cyrillic project that unlocks it via VPN or something like it.
IMO not worth it now that Dreame started to repackaging their bots into cheaper brand Mova for roughly half price too.
My cleaner robot isnt even connected to wifi. Why would it need to be? When i go to work, i hit the clean button. When i come back, my floors are clean. I honestly wonder what more one could ask from such a machine.
I have a schedule in home assistant for it to run on all weekdays at 1pm, except if my partner is home, it won’t run. She is afraid of robots and i wouldnt hear the end of it if she encountered it and couldn’t disable it. Home assistant knows if she is home based on her phone.
I have been exploring valetudo because the roborock integration breaks pretty often. But it seems like a chore and could brick my robot.
One partner afraid of robots the other roots vacuums. Interesting combo
Same in my house. :D
For me the point is automation of low value work. I don’t want to press a button. I don’t want to even think about it.
The shitty app requires cloud access to set boundaries to protect carpets from being washed.
Scheduling automatic runs.
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