How I made my basic robot vacuum smarter using Home Assistant

Robot vacuums are the perfect example of what a smart home device should be. They make your life easier by taking over a tedious task that you otherwise would have had to do yourself, and with automation, you can accomplish it all without doing anything. My robot vacuum isn’t very smart, but I used Home Assistant to make it smarter.

My robot vacuum isn’t stupid, but it’s not that smart

I bought my robot vacuum almost eight years ago and it wasn’t an expensive model. This is an Ecovacs Deebot N79S that I picked up when it went on sale. Smart functions are quite limited; you can use an app to start and stop the robot, select limited cleaning modes, or send it back to the charging station.

Credit: Adam Davidson / How-To Geek

It lacks many of the most useful features available on some current robot vacuum models. For example, some models feature object recognition for better obstacle avoidance, advanced mapping, intelligent planning, and more.

In comparison, my robot vacuum is as basic as it gets. However, by integrating it with Home Assistant, I was able to recreate some features of more expensive models.

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Integrate a basic robot vacuum into Home Assistant

There are several integrations in Home Assistant that you can use to connect and control your robot vacuum. There are integrations for all major brands, such as Roborock, Ecovacs and iRobot Roomba and Braava integrations.

With these integrations, you can control your robot vacuum directly from Home Assistant. For example, you can control it from a dashboard or create automations to control it for you. The integrations also generate useful sensors, based on what your robot vacuum exposes, such as battery level, bin fullness, and total cleaning time.

Many integrations rely on cloud services for control. However, this is not always the only option. For example, thanks to the Ecovacs integration, I can configure my own self-hosted server to send commands to the robot vacuum, allowing me to control it locally.

Adding my robot vacuum to Home Assistant opened up a world of new possibilities. While it’s helpful to have the basic controls, it’s the automations that really made it smarter.

Automations that made it feel like an upgrade

My robot vacuum has very limited planning capabilities. You can set specific times and days to start cleaning, but that only goes so far. Modern robot vacuums have more useful scheduling features, such as cleaning when everyone has left the house and returning to the dock when people return home.

With Home Assistant, I was able to recreate this functionality with my aging robot vacuum. I use a combination of signals in Home Assistant to determine when everyone has left the house. I created an automation that tells the vacuum to start cleaning once everyone has left the house, provided it hasn’t already been done that day.

My robot vacuum also has no way of knowing when it’s full, so it can’t remind me when I need to empty it. After manually tracking how long I used it between flushes, I was able to create a rough automation that notifies me after cleaning for a total number of minutes. This works quite well as a way to be notified when the robot vacuum is almost full.

Credit: Adam Davidson / How-To Geek

My proudest accomplishment is a very crude way of imitating cleaning a specific room. My robot vacuum cleaner does not have a mapping function, but you can drive it using the infrared remote control. With an IR blaster and some trial and error, I was able to get it from its dock in the living room, through the living room door and into the hallway, dining room, or kitchen, all using a combination of IR controls and delays.

It doesn’t work perfectly, but it’s a big improvement, because previously the robot vacuum often got stuck in the living room and never cleaned the other rooms. Thanks to Home Assistant, I was able to make my house much cleaner, without having to pay for a new, more efficient robot vacuum cleaner.

My robot vacuum cleaner still works well

My Deebot robot vacuum is almost eight years old and it was never cutting edge when I bought it. However, it still works perfectly for its main purpose of cleaning my floors. The runtime between charges was starting to get a little short, but an inexpensive battery replacement fixed that problem.

Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek

However, without Home Assistant, I probably would have upgraded it by now. Considering the useful features that the best robot vacuums can offer, I would have been tempted to purchase an upgrade. As it stands, I see no reason to replace it anytime soon.

Using Home Assistant, I was able to make my fairly stupid robot vacuum cleaner a lot smarter. With automations, I can do most of the key things I wish a robot vacuum could do. There are now a lot fewer benefits to upgrading, so I’m much less tempted to spend hundreds of dollars on a product I don’t really need.