deployment

Downloading pre-built Valetudo

You can simply download pre-built binaries of Valetudo from the releases section of the repo. It is currently distrubuted in three different ways:

• valetudo.tar.gz

  This is a single binary file packed with tar+gzip compression. To use it, start with unpacking it typing tar zxf valetudo.tar.gz or via your favourite GUI (de)compressing tool. Continue reading from Installing and configuring section on what to do next.

• valetudo_version_armhf.deb

  This is a package containing both valetudo binary and its configuration files. You need to put it on the device to i.e. /mnt/data directory and then it can be installed by issuing dpkg -i filename.deb on the console. It will unpack itself and put all the files to the required places, so you won't need to create them yourself. After installation you will only have to restart the device using reboot command.

• v11_version.pkg

  The last way to get prebuilt valetudo onto your device is to flash one of these firmware images with valetudo preinstalled inside. It can be easily done using XVacuum app for your smartphone. Vacuum Gen.1 has firmware version numbers like 003xxx and vacuum Gen.2 (roborock S5) has firmware version numbers like 001xxx. After flashing the firmware you will immediately have working device with valetudo preinstalled. Next you should connect to its access point and visit http://192.168.8.1 site to setup Wi-Fi settings.

You can use any of these also for upgrading an older valetudo version to current one.

Acquiring sources and building Valetudo

If you wish to build Valetudo yourself, you will need a reasonably new NodeJS. You can install this from your distro (preferred), or using one of the official pre-compiled binaries on the node website. pkg is able to create armv7-binaries on x86 (and other platforms) just fine — as long as it does not need to pre-compile its JS bytecode. This is why we specify --no-bytecode.

git clone http://github.com/rand256/valetudo
cd valetudo
npm install
npm run build

Next things get a bit more complicated.

Current pkg version (4.4.0 and above) that we use to pack Valetudo into a single binary file has libstdc++ library incompatible with that available in stock vacuum's firmware. Unfortunately the last pkg which was compatible used node-10.4.1 binaries that are quiet outdated and also known for issues with timers in the long run.

Thus Valetudo RE based on newer pkg requires to install a bit updated libstdc++ package into the vacuum. The *.deb files needed could be found on launchpad.net but since Ubuntu 14.04 is EOL they are slowly getting deleted from there. The copy of suitable library (from gcc-6.2.0) is available in deps directory. To install scp *.debs to the vacuum and run dpkg -i file.deb.

Another way to deal with this issue is to manually rebuild pkg binaries to link libstd++ statically. This is the way how prebuilt Valetudo binary was created here.

Installing and configuring

When you'll get a binary named valetudo, you should scp it to /usr/local/bin/ directory.

Then create /etc/init/valetudo.conf using the file located in etc directory to auto-start Valetudo.

To see maps in Valetudo you will need to prevent the robot from communicating with Xiaomi cloud by setting up iptables and configuring the /etc/hosts, so that Xiaomi hostnames were redirected locally back to Valetudo.

First add the content of deployment/etc/hosts to your /etc/hosts file on the robot.

Second edit the /etc/rc.local file and add the content of deployment/etc/rc.local before the exit 0 line.

Reboot

You can now reboot the robot.