making the roaming future

Enabling HomeKit compatibility on a rooted Xiaomi Roborock S50

May 3, 2019 ☉

I recently bought a Xiaomi Roborock S50 vacuum cleaner. On the surface, it sounds like a great product -- pretty affordable, makes for a good looking home appliance, and most importantly, good at taking over a mundane activity that should’ve been automated a long time ago.

On the software side, there is a pretty usable app that allows you to make the most of the device, like checking its current status, customizing some settings, such as cleaning speed, schedule, and several modes of cleanup - general one, spot cleaning, and with the use of the indoor navigation enabled by a laser sensor, zone cleanup, or setting up virtual barriers and no-go zones.

The app also enables you to control the vacuum when you’re away from your home Wi-Fi. It does that by taking advantage of the cloud, i.e. Xiaomi’s computers located in China.

That last thing creeped me out most about this product, and before making a purchase I made sure there’s a way to do something about that. Turns out, there is!

Rooting a vacuum cleaner is so 2019

The software is called Valetudo, and it is essentially a webserver that’s running on the vacuum locally, faking Xiaomi’s backend services. It is not the main piece of the puzzle, though, as putting that webserver on the device was enabled by the amazing work of a group of people behind Dustcloud, which brings a set of methods of opening up the device to hacking.

Installing Valetudo is a pretty simple procedure, and in the end, instead of a piece of software with an origin in a country of questionable respect for people’s privacy, you get a mobile-friendly web client served by that device as well. There is an option to run some of the stack on a home server, but that sounds like too much of a maintenance burden.

HomeKit it

As an Apple and home automation nerd, making all things HomeKit-enabled is important to me. The robot even with its original software is not compatible, but there are several plugins for Homebridge that connect both worlds. The thing is, those plugins don’t control the robot directly, but through the Xiaomi cloud. Once we freed the vacuum from it, we need to find another way. Valetudo with its locally-running web server is exposing a simple HTTP API, so there is a way to control it programmatically, but as niche Homebridge is, a rooted vacuum is surely an even narrower niche, although I can see an overlap in audience there.

There were some requests posted to the authors of the aforementioned Homebridge plugins to add compatibility with Valetudo, but rooting a vacuum seems to be too new of a thing, so in the end there were no plugins for Valetudo-enabled devices. Now that I’m recently also a Node.JS developer (huh?) making backends in Javascript (get off my lawn), I made one.

Make it

The plugin is called homebridge-valetudo-xiaomi-vacuum, it’s available through npm, and the basics are pretty solid already. It exposes a few cleaning modes as buttons, provides the battery status, and some other conveniences. And I had heck of a fun time making it.

Find function call sites in Xcode

Dec 7, 2018 ☉

Recently I have been asked a few times, mostly by disgruntled ex-iOS Android developers, whether Xcode does anything more with the source code than just color-highlight it or allow to jump around the sources by using Jump to definition.

One of the things people seemed to miss the most is the ability to find places which call the focused function, known as, among others, “Find calls” in other IDEs.

It’s true that Xcode has always felt more like a text editor with a compiler than an IDE that provides a rich user interface on top of the source code, like Eclipse or IntelliJ’s tools, for example.

Good news is, it does indeed have some cool code structure aware features hidden in the plain sight. This approach goes in line with Apple’s philosophy of a clean design that doesn’t overwhelm the user with available options. In case of a programming environment though, which is a specialized tool in hands of a perceptive and analytical user for several hours a day, such features could be perhaps a little more obviously visible.

And so there is an extremely useful Related Items editor menu, by default available under a Ctrl-1 shortcut, that includes, among others, a Callers submenu. Yay!

Of course, its contents become available once Xcode manages to index and process app’s source.

Enjoy!

Your stuff on The Web in 2018

Apr 19, 2018 ☉

We want an open web? It needs to be a lot less nerdy. Read more…

MacBook Pro Escape 2016 first impressions

Feb 11, 2017 ☉

I didn't choose the dongle life. The dongle life chose me. Read more…

Oct 27 Special Apple Event made one more developer angry

Oct 29, 2016 ☉

And it's not about the full-on USB Type-C transition. It's watering down the Pro moniker. Read more…

Blogging workflow update

Oct 19, 2016 ☉

Loving the element that was missing in my blogging workflow — ability to post from my phone and have it published to the site automatically while keeping the static nature of content.

Thanks to Dropbox, DO Note and recently added features needed to blogger, which can now listen to post source directory changes, I finally connected the building blocks.

Keychain improvements in iOS 9

Mar 16, 2016 ☉

Recently the keychain on iOS has gained new capabilities in terms of security and privacy, especially around Touch ID. Let's explore some of those. Read more…

Headlines 1.4 released

Mar 16, 2016 ☉

I'm happy to announce that after months of tweaks, real-world testing and foot-dragging, version 1.4 of Headlines is finally up on the App Store. Thanks to a coworker and a friend of mine that happens to be an awesome UX and UI designer as well, I'm extremely happy with app's updated look. Read more…

Varieties of news readers →

Aug 1, 2015 ☉

Brent Simmons puts news readers in three categories: Newspapers, mailbox-type, rivers. Read more…

Application Transport Security override

Jun 13, 2015 ☉

iOS 9 will default to a new connection security mechanism called App Transport Security that essentially forces apps to transfer data from their backend services using secure HTTP connection practices, like TLS 1.2 for instance. Read more…

Blogging easier

May 29, 2015 ☉

As the setup of my blog requires creating a markdown file that follows a special template, I kept finding excuses to not write anything, because I had to perform a few awkward steps:

• copy an existing post file,
• change the date to near future,
• fill it with new content and finally,
• publish it.

It felt dirty and unelegant, so I implemented an option in blogger that prints out a specific template, be it a post or a snippet, which includes a header filled with time set to 15 minutes in the future, an example title and chosen author. My obsession for clean technical solutions to first-world problems is satisfied and blogging is fun again!

Passwords

May 28, 2015 ☉

What if we kept one master password and let our device generate an account- or site-specific passwords needed on-demand? It's definitely not a new idea, though I'm not entirely sure why not a very popular one. Perhaps there's a gap between the notebook/post-it and password database approaches I'm not aware of? Read more…

Decentralized

Sep 30, 2014 ☉

Posts by Manton Reece and Noah Read, as well as a recent Core Intuition episode 155 inspired me, among other things, to add snippets on my blog. Though it's a lot easier to switch to a Twitter app and simply tap away, Twitter owns whatever you write to the level of controlling the way it's allowed to be shared outside of the ecosystem. I.e. it's a platform that's open to content being added to it. Read more…

Story timelines

Sep 24, 2014 ☉

Facebook's timeline algorithm has received a lot of heat in the last few months after it was revealed that the timeline was essentially a part of an experiment and users following the default "Top stories" timeline were the test subjects. Read more…

Contractually-obligated testing →

Aug 31, 2014 ☉

I usually set up assertions in methods in order to guard correctness of incoming parameters, outgoing results and invariants, but this technique looks very interesting. Here the contract can be set up in one place and modified without changing the methods’ implementation.

Headlines app

Aug 24, 2014 ☉

So I made it to 1.0 and it was not easy. Read more…

Technical debt 101 →

Jun 29, 2014 ☉

Nice article summarising what technical debt actually is.

Compiler Writers Gone Wild: ARC Madness →

Jun 29, 2014 ☉

ARC is magic, but sometimes, as with all magic, if one is not careful, it might become dangerous.

Hello world

Jun 21, 2014 ☉

So, you surely know about the whole shoemaker and his wife’s shoes thing. This has been a long time coming, but I finally got around to making a static site generator, like all the cool kids do these days.

I hope I will be able to find time and will to make good use of it.

func hello() -> String {
  return "Hello"
}

Hold on, that’s not Go. Looks like Apple cooked up something equally interesting. Good times!