Robot mops for large rooms, gyms or similar

For our sports club we tried to get robot mop to support our cleaning staff. So we tried a

1. Dreame X40
2. Roborock S8 MaxV Ultra
3. Eufy S1 Pro

All of them a little bit different. A vibrating mop, rotating mops and a rolling mop...

But that kind of things do not matter - the challenge is:

Does the robot navigate in a empty room with next wall about +5m away. 

If you read all the advertisements about LIDAR, you think that this is no problem at all, but this is really problem.

One remark: None of these vendors promise anything for such conditions. All robots are for typical households. 

Dreame 

So let's start with the Dreame:

Mapping went well, but the robot stopped in the middle of the gym with "Laser distance sensor error". 

So even the robot had a complete map - no chance to do the cleaning. It just stopped and was not even able to return to the station. 

Roborock 

What about Roborock? Even worse. During the mapping phase, the robot was only able to drive on the area, which was already detected. And detection is only possible if the LIDAR is reflected. Workaround: Walk around, because he can recognize humans and the area between the robot and you is tagged as detected:

You can still recognize the black area which was not detected - which means the robot will not clean there. And the proportions do not fit. Means the robot lost orientation so the gym is some meters to short...

And: LIDAR error when 5m away from the walls... no return to base station possible. 

Eufy

Mapping did not work. Funny thing: the app was showing the path of the robot with a white dotted line. The map is not drawn in the correct way - it is point mirrored. But this does not matter. The real problem is, that the wall on the left of the picture is there twice and it does not match. So the robot lost some meters on one side of the gym: 

The robot itself got so confused with that double wall, that it hits the wall several times and then it was not able to finish the mapping. I forced the robot to return to the base station and it bravely tried to cross the gym - stopped in the middle with:

"Lidar scanning abnormal" - that means nothing to detect :( 

Summary

May be i start with a word to the developers, which are responsible for such algorithms: If there is nothing to detect, than of couse the LIDAR might be blocked. But consider an empty gym: Then you can send this error, but if the users confirms, that LIDAR is not blocked - ever considered just to keep speed and direction until a wall is detected?

If anybody has comments please let me know! Ideas are welcome! 

Small Solar Plant with Growatt Nexa 2000

Requirements 

There are many drivers for using solar power at home. Key requirements for me were

• Storage with off grid functionality
• Deliver max. 800W on grid (due to german regulation) 
• Solar input up to 2000W
• Battery with >1kWh

Decision 

My decision was to buy a Growatt Nexa 2000: 

Installation (non IT parts) 

Physical installation (wiring, etc.) was easy. Just connect :) 

Installation (IT part) 

Connecting the device to the network was very well explained in the manual and the app confirmed the connection. But:

• Device is shown as offline in the app
• In you Wifi you can not find anything like "Nexa" or "Growatt"

What can you do? I tried to delete the device in the app and repeated to onboarding. Best thing you can do is:

WAIT 

Because the device was shown in my network with its serial number 0XXXXXXXXXXXX072 and an IP used (and i could ping it).

After 30 minutes the app started to show the device as "online". But changing the configuration did not work. 

After another wait (may be another 10 minutes) adjusting the operation mode could be change (load first <-> battery first).

Now (after >2h) i was able to start the firmware update (the app signaled from the beginning, that an update has to be installed).

But that stalled by 83% - device went offline (i did a ping all the time). Came back, went offline again, came back, .... Then: close the app, enter app again and firmware version is from 9.05.05.04 to 10.09.07.07 and ping is working faster than before. With stalling at 83% i thought, i lost the device completely but it went well and works better than before...
 

I am not sure, if i just hit an maintenance on Growatts side or the device onbaordings are queued and until you can fully operate, some time has to pass.

Integration

The app is quite nice, but for all other things i have my grafana dashboard. So next is to see, how to extract data from the Nexa.  

I will tell about my attempts in the next weeks :) 

 

Review: SASE Architecture for dummies

Linked in showed some weeks ago the following posting:

So i downloaded the PDF provided by https://www.netskope.com and here my review on this book, which contains an introduction and 5 chapters on 74 pages, which is really more than the typical booklets i reviewed on this blog in the last years. 

The introduction starts with a nice remark: "But security can’t inhibit people’s ability to do their work." - that means, there are new demands from business for apps, services, etc. which does not fit in the traditional castle security approach, because cloud is an environment, which does not fit to the old data center security. The proposal of this book is:

The architecture called secure access service edge (SASE; pronounced
“sassy”) is the proven way forward.  

Chapter one focuses on the vision, how SASE can secure an enterprise. One assumption here is, no enterprise can avoid SaaS apps/services, if you want to be competitive, but old security mechanisms can cope with that challenges. In this chapter the starting building blocks for SASE are enumerated:

• SWGs (Secure web gateways)
• CASBs (Cloud access security brokers)
• ZTNA (Zero trust network access)
• DLP (Data loss prevention)

and then some others are added like FWaaS and RBI (Remote browser isolation). All these tools are summarized under "Security Service Edge" (SSE). The end of the section focuses on the discussion if SSE and SDWAN has to be delivered from one vendor or if a dual vendor approach will work as well. 

The title of chapter 2 is "Bringing SASE to Life with SSE and SDWAN": and the proposal here is, that security and network performance will enhance each other within SASE. The chapter is divided in to parts: looking into the SSE part and the into the networking part. For the SSE part the identity is key and the integration of all the different building blocks (s. enumeration above) with advanced thread protection (ATP). The SDWAN part is from my perspective somehow an advertising of netskope.

Chapter 3 is named "Empowering People through SASE". A summary of this section can be given with the following quote:

But security is also about shielding your staff from themselves —
guarding against the mistakes, temptations, negligence, and errors
of judgment that can do irreparable harm. This is critical in a land-
scape where more than 85 percent to 95 percent of cybersecurity
incidents are attributable to human error, according to research
from Tessian and IBM --- SASE is a powerful tool for navigating these
waters, removing restrictions on your people while empowering
them to work safely in new ways.

Key for empowering SASE is context - every action is examined and based on user behavior activities can be taken to prevent attacks, etc..

"Protecting data and applications" is the fourth chapter of the book. The promise of SASE is, that traffic is not simply blocked or allowed - there a context aware policies possible and there are less tools, which have to be configured and integrated.

Chapter 5 is a 10-step guide, how to implement SASE in your enterprise. These steps vary from "gain awareness" to "optimize network performance". From my perspective a good checklist to start from.

Overall i liked the clear structure of this book. Every section starts with 5 key phrases, what you can learn in that section. There are many comparisons drawn with castles, modern homes or airport security or .... That is really a good idea and makes it much more understandable. Maybe the following snippets shows, why this book was sponsored by netskope:

But that does not matter - if you want to start into SASE: Read this book!
 

 

Flashing Tasmota onto a Wifi sensor controller (MHCOZY TH1CH-B1RF)

Today i got a MHCOZY TH1CH-B1RF and installed tasmota:

MHCOZY TH1CH-B1RF is a Wifi temperature and humidity controller:

Product details say:

Users can add the device to the APP eWeLink in order to remotely control connected home appliances or devices. In self-locking mode, customers can remotely turn on/off connected devices immediately. When in inching mode, customers can have two wiring ways to select: * Turn on 1s and then auto-off,* Turn off 1s and then auto-on.

Of course you can stay with the original software, but then you have to integrate EWELINK to you enviroment (which uses port 5353 with some strange multicast mechanism). I want to get the values via HTTP. So the questions is: Can this hardware run tasmota?

If you open this device, you see, that the chip is a PSF-Bxx:

(picture is a screenshot from here: https://templates.blakadder.com/PSF-B.html)

With knowing that, Tasmota can be flashed onto this device:
(all the connects are a little bit tricky, because there are no plugs and you have to constantly touch the contacts with the pins)

1. Connect GPIO0 with ground (you can use the shielding of the USB connector on the board) 
2. Insert power via the USB connector
3. after 5 seconds remove the connection from GPIO0 to ground
4. connect your serial programmer TX --> chip RX
5. connect your serial programmer RX --> chip TX
   (i always start with TX --> TX and RX --> RX, which is wrong 🤐 ) 
   
6. open tasmotizer.py
   (for installation look here - i chose option 2)
7. if you choose "backup - save original firmware", then you have to start after the backup with step 1 again.
8. choose "release" and "tasmota.bin"
   
   
   
9. click "Tasmotize!"

After a reboot change to the new Wifi "tasmota....XXXX" and enter your Wifi credentials there on 192.168.4.1. And after a reboot you can open the web GUI like this here:

 

(the DHT11 sensor has to be selected for GPIO14)

Now i can get the values via

curl 'http://192.168.178.107/cm?cmnd=status%2010&user=admin&password=XXXX'

"StatusSNS":{"Time":"2024-02-03T19:19:29","DHT11":{"Temperature":24.3,"Humidity":50.0,"DewPoint":13.2},"TempUnit":"C"}}