Neato made a line of (good) vacuum robots with Lidar.
It seems there were bought by a company called Vorwerk, and Vorwerk are shutting down the cloud infra.
This means the app, floor plans, schedules, no-go zones etc will no longer work. The robot can only be manually started by pushing the button on the device.
As an owner of one of these robots this is sad but not unexpected for anything relying on an app.
By submitting to HN, I’m hopeful someone can point me in the direction of open firmware or OSS projects that can help me restore the lost functionality.
Perhaps one day some jurisdiction will have the wherewithal to implement legislation to stop this madness. At the very least all the device and protocol documentation and crypto keys etc should be escrowed somewhere for the day this happens.
A great opportunity to bring up that a robot that operates 100% locally and is located within Bluetooth range has never needed a cloud account, has never had to become unavailable whenever AWS goes down, and certainly doesn't have to be reduced to a manual dud when its company ceases to exist. I wonder what whoever produced such "Systems Design" would have to say to customers now.
Companies should be forced to hand over the communication and operation specification of their IoT devices as soon as they meaningfully degrade the quality or functionality of a cloud service. This will restore trust in the ecosystem, avoid ewaste, and nourish a community of developers/hackers/geeks/users.
Great framing, we’re incapable of maintaining a cloud solution that we built for a product we sold to you, so we’re taking it down for your protection.
I’m surprised that they aren’t charging their customers for such great service and attention to detail.
Wonder why they built them like that? How was the decision made, just simply incompetence: they didn't know how to do it any other way, delusion: they expected to be become the Google or the Microsoft of vacuums: they'd never go out of business. Maybe just plain greed: wanted to milk their customers for extra features and disable them remotely if they stop paying?
It's ridiculous that people are jumping on the vendors bandwagon - control everything remotely, AI inside, etc.
Why the hell would I need the cloud to control a vacuum cleaner?
Sure, I understand that there are a lot of manufacturers today, and basically all products are similar, so marketing people are looking for any way to differentiate a product from a lot of others... but cloud-connected devices are a road to hell... hello LG, Samsung, Canon, Western Digital and others who change cloud solutions for hardware so often that you blow your nose and get a service cancellation message in the mail :)
I own a Neato robot and I’m on the fence how I feel about it. On the one hand, it bothers me to no end that a shitty architectural design makes it so my robot loses half its functionality when the company goes under.
On the other hand, Neato went very bust a long time ago. Vorwerk bought the scraps, and I’m thankful to them keeping the servers on this long. They could’ve totally structured the acquisition such that all customer obligations ended with Neato (and who knows, maybe they did), but they kept it on even though Vorwerk never made a single euro from me. I wish they’d keep it on longer and fix/duct-tape the security issues, but can’t really fault them for not wanting to.
Meta note: I think we should be angrier at Apple and Google over this. It’s in their interest to push everyone and everything to the cloud (their clouds ideally) and so they never pushed for great local connectivity solutions in their phone OSes.
There’s not really a good reason why it has to be hard for a device to connect to a nearby phone over some reliable signal, eg a home’s existing wifi network. (HN disclaimer: yeah yeah, i know it’s possible, but it’s a big hassle and the UX sucks so a manufacturer is effectively forced to go cloud if they want a device to be controllable from an app). The industry could have long developed some fancy protocol/system over wifi intended for just that. But device manufacturers aren’t strong enough to push for that in networking land, and Apple/Google/Microsoft have an interest against “local” becoming a normal thing normal people can figure out.
I feel like this is what regulation should be about. Instead of demanding that companies open source their systems if they go under, IMO we should have rules saying that smart devices shouldn’t need internet access for controlling them from nearby. If rules like that are in place, a push for a way to make the UX for that as good as it is via some cloud server will automatically happen.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 38.5 ms ] threadYour title is wrong
It seems there were bought by a company called Vorwerk, and Vorwerk are shutting down the cloud infra.
This means the app, floor plans, schedules, no-go zones etc will no longer work. The robot can only be manually started by pushing the button on the device.
As an owner of one of these robots this is sad but not unexpected for anything relying on an app.
By submitting to HN, I’m hopeful someone can point me in the direction of open firmware or OSS projects that can help me restore the lost functionality.
Oh, and to reply to that point: the EU will have mandated labels on packages that will indicate how repairable something is.
https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/jrc-news-and-upda...
It seems to be in effect in France already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repairability
I’m surprised that they aren’t charging their customers for such great service and attention to detail.
I don't believe you...
The title is strictly wrong, the things that's being discontinued is the cloud platform.
Still shit though...
Why the hell would I need the cloud to control a vacuum cleaner?
Sure, I understand that there are a lot of manufacturers today, and basically all products are similar, so marketing people are looking for any way to differentiate a product from a lot of others... but cloud-connected devices are a road to hell... hello LG, Samsung, Canon, Western Digital and others who change cloud solutions for hardware so often that you blow your nose and get a service cancellation message in the mail :)
On the other hand, Neato went very bust a long time ago. Vorwerk bought the scraps, and I’m thankful to them keeping the servers on this long. They could’ve totally structured the acquisition such that all customer obligations ended with Neato (and who knows, maybe they did), but they kept it on even though Vorwerk never made a single euro from me. I wish they’d keep it on longer and fix/duct-tape the security issues, but can’t really fault them for not wanting to.
There’s not really a good reason why it has to be hard for a device to connect to a nearby phone over some reliable signal, eg a home’s existing wifi network. (HN disclaimer: yeah yeah, i know it’s possible, but it’s a big hassle and the UX sucks so a manufacturer is effectively forced to go cloud if they want a device to be controllable from an app). The industry could have long developed some fancy protocol/system over wifi intended for just that. But device manufacturers aren’t strong enough to push for that in networking land, and Apple/Google/Microsoft have an interest against “local” becoming a normal thing normal people can figure out.
I feel like this is what regulation should be about. Instead of demanding that companies open source their systems if they go under, IMO we should have rules saying that smart devices shouldn’t need internet access for controlling them from nearby. If rules like that are in place, a push for a way to make the UX for that as good as it is via some cloud server will automatically happen.