A Verge story on hacking your robot vacuum so it doesn’t phone home.

  • muusemuuse@lemm.ee
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    2 days ago

    I’m actually looking into this now with some hubspace lights I have. They seem to have disabled flashing from the bootloader so the only way to do this is with signed updates from the manufacturer. But I dont like the cloud-only method of control hubspace uses so it looks like…desoldering the original ESP32 and putting on another one thats been flashed with ravencore, ESPhome, WLED, or tasmota is what I’ll have to do.

    • archomrade [he/him]@midwest.social
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      18 hours ago

      yup. I haven’t done it yet, but apparently ceiling fan controllers are a pretty standard thing, so usually all you really have to do is replace the whole controller box (they’re like $30 apiece from what I remember), or replace the controller board itself like you mentioned.

      I’ve stopped buying appliances from places like Home Depot for this reason, seems like they simply do not stock items that aren’t their brand-name cloud-hosted services, or larger brands like hue.