lka1988

....then proceeded to get stoned and watch it roam the house, doing it's thing.

And then it dawned on me - I now have a completely self-contained autonomous robot that is free to roam my house, not attached to any cloud services, doing actually productive things; and I have full control over it.

I know it's an odd thing for a grown-ass man to get excited over, but I can attest to the fact that 14 year-old me would be over the fucking moon about this. My parents got me the first Lego Mindstorms set for Christmas when I was younger, and I had an old Palm V handheld from my uncle; I managed to figure out how to control the Mindstorms controller with the Palm V's built-in IR blaster, using just a "universal remote" app.

How far we've come.... Just accomplishing this has given me a renowned motivation for self-hosting shit; it's incredibly freeing. And knowing that the manufacturer of this vacuum could access it at any point and just outright shut it off without my knowledge.... I don't have to deal with that anymore.

The robot is a Wyze "Robot Vacuum" (model WVCR200S), which is based on the 3irobotix CRL-200S - the very same robot one author recently discovered was being intentionally shut off after he had blocked some telemetry URLs. I bought it for $20 on eBay. Fully functional, but the battery only lasted ~10 minutes from a full charge. Luckily it just uses four 18650 cells in series, so replacing those was a pretty simple task. I did not buy a whole new pack (most of them are expensive and falsify their true capacities), rather opting for individual Molicel P30B 3000mAh cells for ~$5 each. I ended up having to peel off the nickel tabs from the old cells and carefully solder them to the new cells, as I don't have a spot welder. Lots of flux and a soldering iron set to 450C were key here. I would not recommend that method 😅.

Edit: My parents dropped by last night and I gushed about it to them... My dad is a tech guy, so he was pretty interested. My mom was more "I have no idea what you're talking about but I'm happy that you're happy" 😂😂

I blame my entire self-hosting hobby trajectory on a single piece of software that I used over a decade ago and fell absolutely in love with:

CCC One

If any of you have ever worked in collision repair (body shop, insurance, estimating, etc), you know what I'm talking about. The user interface was essentially - you open the program and are presented with a list of all the vehicles that have visited your shop, with some basic identifying info including the current status (estimate only, in repair, etc). You select a vehicle and open it up, and you're presented with everything related to that vehicle, including estimates, workorders, POs, parts, service time, repair time, photos, ties to LKQ and other used parts vendors for pricing, and a host of other useful shit - all separated neatly into tabs and clickable links.

I've been going mad trying to find something in the FOSS world that comes even close to this in order to keep track of my own projects, inlcuding vehicles, computer builds, other random shit. So far though, I have found only kanban boards (which are missing key project management features), or full-fledged CRM suites with way more added bloat than I will ever use.

I'm not looking for FOSS software with a 1:1 parity to CCC One; but there has got to be SOMETHING in the FOSS world that at least has some semblance of this capability. I use Planka right now, and it's fine, but there is just so much left to be desired.

Am I just expecting too much? If I am, please tell me. Or maybe help me better utilize the tools I already have.

Thank you SO SO MUCH to all who contribute to the FOSS community, you guys are serious rock stars. I barely understand if and for loops...