Am I the only one confused by why a vacume needs a live video feed? Who’s sitting there thinking “I want to watch what my vacume sees!”
Ok so I used to work for iRobot, the OG robot vacuum maker. Robot vacuums used to vacuum randomly. To make them vacuum systematically, they need to map your house. One cheap way to do that is to use a camera roughly pointing at your ceiling and do Video SLAM. The camera identifies features on your ceiling and how they are changing to know where the robot is and map the room.
I guess ecovac thought they could add a camera feed feature for free since they already had a camera on the robot.
Huh, I thought they were “dog poop sensors”
Probably to map the room and avoid obstacles like Chairs and pets. Low res cameras are probably the cheapest option for hardware.
Since no one said it yet: Valetudo
Unfortunately no support for Ecovacs.
How could it have been worse. A fucking basic appliance was hijacked. Ofc its not weaponized, that would have made it worse I guess
And nobody posted This yet!? The Roomba That Screams When it Bumps Into Stuff
imagine now somehow combining its sensor data with outputs from a LLM everyone would think that their roomba has become sentient
