Roomba Combo j7 with Home Assistant

We got a Roomba Combo j7 sometime back. It's a combo vacuum and mopping robot. We primarily use it for Vacuuming, but mopping is decent too. We used to once a week vacuuming using Dyson. But I needed to vacuum our bedroom daily, which is difficult if you do it manually.

I researched before getting the Roomba because I wanted it to work entirely offline if required. Home Assistant is our main driver of household technologies. I want everything IoT these days to work with Home Assistant. It's the only way to keep the hardware working; you can't trust Apple, Google, or Amazon to give access to your hardware ( the hardware you paid for and own) after a period. Hence, the need for "Works with Home Assistant." and "Works Offline."

Home Assistant has built-in support for Roomba. It depends on the scripts to extract the password for the Roomba from the cloud; post-extraction, it can work with it directly. It's all built into the Home Assistant.

I run Home Assistant as a docker container and couldn't extract the credentials for some reason. I don't know if it's docker or something else. Instead of spending time on debugging, I ran the scripts locally on my Ubuntu machine so it could extract them and then used them with the Home Assistant. It worked.

I used roombapy to get the password. Before I began, I set up the Roomba using their app, made it map the house, gave names to rooms, etc. Once the initial setup was done, I logged into my home router and got the IP address of the Roomba. I also made the IP address of the Roomba static. 

Then, I installed roombapy and ran the command.

 roomba-password <local ip address>

In my case that didn't work. So, I cloned the repo and used the script directly. And it worked. I used the credentials in the Home Assistant setup. 

Automation

• Clean specific rooms at specific times. (Needs some addional work) based on baby sleeping time, etc
• Alert when the job started or stopped
• Alert on a bin full or battery-low

Why automated Vacuuming?

Daily Vacuuming was becoming impossible with pets, older people, babies, and working adults all living under one roof. Now, it can be done easily, accommodating everyone's needs. That is an improvement in quality of life. It also reduces Selvi's workload in general, and she can focus on other things.

Why not other brands

There are other brands that are available and compatible with Home Assistant. However, the integrations were not easy ( like having to open the hardware panel), support was not great in India, and they were unavailable in India. So I went with Roomba.

Other ways of using it

You can continue to use the Roomba App if you want. It works without the internet as well. 

What Next

I use the built-in support for Roomba and not rest980 addon by Jeremy Willans, which has many features, like visual maps, etc. Maybe I will upgrade one day. For now, the default is good enough for me.

I also want to add more automations based on our google work calendars etc.

Do you have a RoboVac? Whats your use-case and choice?

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