I’m looking for a vacuum robot preferably under 500€ and with a cleaning station. My main concern is that most robot vacuum providers seem to need to be connected to the internet. Are there any providers that either don’t need that, where I can block the internet connection or any other way not getting a spy in my home? I’m fine with it if some work is needed
Another approach is rather than worry about whether the robot or IoT device is respecting your privacy, set up your network to be segmented with VLANs so that the IoT devices can only reach the internet and nothing else on your network. Then just provide fake info for setting up accounts with the IoT devices.
That mitigates a rather minimal leak while ignoring the gaping black data hole.
I do the reverse. My IoT devices that I didn’t make myself get shut out of communicating with anything but Home Assistant.
I’ll let them have internet access if there’s a firmware update, but that’s it. Anything that requires an internet connection to work doesn’t get purchased.
… I may need a tutorial on doing this… My HA works great, but I have a ton of Hue in my house from before and really like the bulbs and stuff… It would be nice to block those off from the Internet… Is that doable on the router or do I need to upgrade my network (been thinking about doing some upgrades anyways).
The easiest way is to put your IoT devices on the guest network and block internet access to the network, but you could do firewall rules if your router allows that.
Or, get a home lab router instead of consumer grade. I went with MikroTik, and it’s a great bang for your buck. It’s not too dissimilar from Cisco in the cli, but the GUI is nice too.
you need a router and mostly likely wireless APs that support VLANs.
I like this approach cuz it plays ball and can be reused for a number of products. Could have an “appliances” network and make a reusable fake “appliances” identity for any device that wants to IoT.