Home Automation

I’ve deployed numerous iRobot and Neato units over the years. My previous iRobot fleet served faithfully for five years; they are easy to repair, but their performance has fallen behind, and the mandatory cloud tethering is a strategic disadvantage for any privacy-conscious home. The Dreame X40 Ultra is a superior piece of hardware, but to truly own it, I had to strip away the cloud requirement. The Mission: Local Control To achieve full autonomy, I used Valetudo. It replaces the cloud interface with a local web server, keeping the data off external servers and locked within my IoT VLAN and Home Assistant instance. ...

My dad was a ham radio operator, so I spent a good chunk of my childhood tearing down rigs and building antennas with him. By the time I was old enough to break things on my own, I was compiling Linux kernels with AX.25 support just to mess around with packet radio. Truth is, RF is more magic than science. You can do the math all day, but physics always gets a vote in the end. ...