Migrating from Valetudo 0.6 to Valetudo RE

[xefil]

Hi all,
I'm using Valetudo 0.6 on my Gen1 Xiaomi Vacuum (rockrobo.vacuum.v1) with firmware 'v11_004018.12edfghb75.fullos.pkg' and would like to test Valetudo RE.
So I have some questions:

1. First of all, which procedure should I follow to apply your mod?

2. Is then possible to implement forbidden zones or virtual walls in any way (or workarounds?) ?

3. I've then an issue I hope this version could solve. The Vacuum is under the sofa. Sometims happens that the sofa is so low that the Vacuum draws it and in case of Zone Cleaning it doesn't go out from the sofa due it's thinking the sofa is a wall. I need to manually control it out from the sofa (i.e. go forward for 50cm) and THEN start a zone cleaning. In a similar situation if I clean a zone which has the door closed (because I've rabbits around the home :-D ), if I want that later the robot goes to the other room, due it has recorded there was a closed door, he cannot find the correct way to reach it. Only solution, in this case, is to control it manually again through the open door. The way to home works always.

Any suggestions and hints?

Thanks a lot!

Simon

[rand256]

1. Just for trying on Gen1 you may want to download just valetudo.tar.gz packed binary to /mnt/data/valetudo, then unpack it, run stop valetudo to stop currently running version and finally run RE with ./valetudo from that directory. After you've finished with your testing, simply press ctrl+C to stop RE and type start valetudo to run again your installed version. Oh, and keep a copy of your existing configuration - /mnt/data/valetudo/config.json file - in case something breaks.
   For a permanent installation I'd suggest flashing a pre-built image with pre-installed RE binary (or build it yourself using vacuumz image builder).

2. The thing is that valetudo is actually something like a GUI (Web UI) working over a low-level manufacturer's firmware. So it can only call functions the device already have. Plus a few hacks like copying maps (which is possible only because maps are actually files which can be copied). To create forbidden zones or virtual walls you need a firmware from gen2 running on gen1 - and it's not about valetudo.

3. For this you can save a map with all doors opened and reload it when you need it.

[xefil]

Thanks a lot! I'm testing it based on your hints and I'll install it asap. The auto-map-restore option sounds great and is something that could help me a lot.
About virtual walls, well, I'll try to create more zones excluding possible frequent forbidden areas.
And for the manual mode, sounds good. @rand256 seems that this version could help me a lot!
Simon

PS: what does exactly save the map-backup?

[rand256]

what does exactly save the map-backup?

For gen1 it just copies these files and restarts some system processes. In gen2+ there are a few less barbaric ways to reload the map, but they all provide the same results.

[xefil]

Hello @rand256
ok for the backup, thank you.
I've tried to update via miio as done with previous version like this:

mirobo --token MyToken--ip 192.168.3.61 update-firmware /root/software/vacuum/Valetudo_RE/v11_004018.pkg

But at the end of the download, at 100% il fails. Ideas?

Downloading:  99%|█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████▋ | 99/100 [01:47<00:01,  1.28s/it]DEBUG:miio.miioprotocol:192.168.3.61:54321 >>: {'id': 1444, 'method': 'miIO.get_ota_state', 'params': []}
DEBUG:miio.miioprotocol:192.168.3.61:54321 (ts: 2021-02-02 11:25:02, id: 1444) << {'result': ['downloading'], 'id': 1444}
DEBUG:miio.miioprotocol:192.168.3.61:54321 >>: {'id': 1445, 'method': 'miIO.get_ota_progress', 'params': []}
DEBUG:miio.miioprotocol:192.168.3.61:54321 (ts: 2021-02-02 11:25:02, id: 1445) << {'result': [99], 'id': 1445}
Downloading:  99%|█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████▋ | 99/100 [01:48<00:01,  1.28s/it]DEBUG:miio.miioprotocol:192.168.3.61:54321 >>: {'id': 1446, 'method': 'miIO.get_ota_state', 'params': []}
DEBUG:miio.miioprotocol:192.168.3.61:54321 (ts: 2021-02-02 11:25:03, id: 1446) << {'result': ['failed'], 'id': 1446}
DEBUG:miio.miioprotocol:192.168.3.61:54321 >>: {'id': 1447, 'method': 'miIO.get_ota_progress', 'params': []}
DEBUG:miio.miioprotocol:192.168.3.61:54321 (ts: 2021-02-02 11:25:03, id: 1447) << {'result': [99], 'id': 1447}
Failed:  99%|██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████▌ | 99/100 [01:50<00:01,  1.12s/it]
DEBUG:miio.vacuum_cli:Writing {'seq': 1447, 'manual_seq': 0} to /root/.cache/python-miio/python-mirobo.seq
(venv) root@cctv:~/software/vacuum/flasher#

Thanks

[rand256]

If you have 4018 fw installed without special patches then you can't flash firmware this way anymore - the manufacturer forbids that in recent versions. In this case you need to do a factory reset to downgrade, and then try again.

[xefil]

Ok, I'll give it a try with a factory reset and then reflash it. I'll leto you know.
Thanks