> Robots still work: Your Neato robot will continue to function manually. Simply press the button once to launch a full house run.

Your title is wrong

Neato made a line of (good) vacuum robots with Lidar.

It seems there were bought by a company called Vorwerk, and Vorwerk are shutting down the cloud infra.

This means the app, floor plans, schedules, no-go zones etc will no longer work. The robot can only be manually started by pushing the button on the device.

As an owner of one of these robots this is sad but not unexpected for anything relying on an app.

By submitting to HN, I’m hopeful someone can point me in the direction of open firmware or OSS projects that can help me restore the lost functionality.

Perhaps one day some jurisdiction will have the wherewithal to implement legislation to stop this madness. At the very least all the device and protocol documentation and crypto keys etc should be escrowed somewhere for the day this happens.

A great opportunity to bring up that a robot that operates 100% locally and is located within Bluetooth range has never needed a cloud account, has never had to become unavailable whenever AWS goes down, and certainly doesn't have to be reduced to a manual dud when its company ceases to exist.

This reminds me a lot situation with computer games. Maybe stop killing games movement scope should be widened to all the software?