After moving into a new apartment and refurbishing most of it, I had a unscratched electronic itch that needed satisfaction. We've previously used a Roborock as a robot-vacuum, that usually ran during daytime. However, the new apartment did not have any obvious location for its base station. $W_{AF}$ beeing the deciding factor in the equation. I had the idea of placing it under the kitchen cabinets, and adding a motorized gate hide it away.

The solution was a DC linear actuator and a ESP32 running ESPHome. In the beginning it integrated quite easily with HomeAssistant. It did however add a lot of overhead that is HomeAssistant itself. Soooo the project also spiraled into creating a control panel for HomeAssistant, reusing an old android phone. That's the screen I'm pressing in the video below.

The video is not the best example, but it's pretty much all that is left from the project.

It turned out that running the entire thing of HomeAssistant wasn't the smartest choice. Seeing as it relied upon communicating via a web-api to xiaomi in order to detect when the vacuum was in the process of beginning a cycle or returning to base. While easy to implement at first, the rate of maxium allowed requests was lowered to around 1 request pr 30. second or more. When returning, this usually would not be a problem. However when starting a cycle, it would cause the vacuums lidar to belive it was stuck, and then canceling the cleaning operation.

If I were to repeat this project, i would probably use a hall-effect sensor, or try to tap directly into the base station. The selected linear regulator was also a tad slow for my taste. I remember trying different approaches with 3D-printed sections without results worth noting.

Having to do two touches/operations severely reduces the aforementioned $W_{AF}$. She relied upon the xiaomi-app and not HomeAssistant. This whole endeavour led me to conclude home automating is still a niché, even though it's become more accessible. The lack of proper standards, the nature of closed source devices and not to forget the vast amount of devices makes me believe it's never going to become user-friendly enough for adoptation.

The end solution involved an extension cord and placing the base-station under the sofa in the living room.