I recently got an “older” generation robot vacuum for this reason. I wish the dreame debug board was more accessible. The designer and creator purposely made it this way so people would learn how to solder. I could solder but I no longer have the time or patience to source my own PCB and parts. Thankfully, someone sells one premade on Tindie.
The overall "I want you to have a project, not a product" vibe put me off using this when deciding what robot to buy. I want a clean floor, not another hobby that turns into a chore at the least opportune moment.
Luckily, someone explained to me that in practice once you've set up, it usually just works, and it runs completely on the robot (i.e. no second device/server/homelab that you'd have to maintain) and since updates are optional, you shouldn't be required to deal with it unless you want to.
(The offputting statements are at https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/why-not-valetudo.html: "it is very much not [a product]. [...] Instead, it is highly idealistic, anti-consumerism, anti-hypergrowth and anti just-continuing-what-we-do-now. [...] these aspects are baked into its design. There is no way of using it without being constantly confronted with them. If you’re not willing to reflect, introspect, grow and most importantly stop, you will not be happy with Valetudo.", plus this "not selling PCBs out of principle so people have to source and solder themselves" - I can solder, but I prefer to delegate boring, efficiently automatable tasks to robots in a factory and would much rather pay someone 10 bucks for a finished board than pay more for the shipping of individual parts and end up with 4 extra unpopulated PCBs that I have zero use for.)
I wholly agree with the anti-closed vibe. I even run Valetudo on my roborock. But lol I just want to control my vacuum cleaner locally and that's it. I haven't updated mine for years exactly because I just want shit to work and not have to be constantly fixing things and "be confronted".
