The Xiaomi robot vacuum joined my household last night. It wasn’t too complex to switch the voice pack over to English (it has ~50 Chinese voices, but only 1 English, and you have to be able to read Chinese to find it).
Once setup (the app has every permission possible on Android!), dirt patrol began. It uses an ultrasonic/radar/laser dome to map out your house, and you can see this map grow in real time. My cat kept a close watch the entire time!
Now, on to the network security. Of course this was put on the IoT SSID. it has a fair bit of chatter to the internet (hadoop on amazon is the biggest). A little bit of hacking, and its token was yielded, allowing it to integrate with homeassistant.io.
Interestingly, it has no open ports on the unit (it does maintain persistent outbound connections to the cloud). Have to do a bit more research. But for sure its sharing a map of my house, and when I’m home, w/ the cloud.
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