DIY HomeKit with Raspberry Pi and Xiaomi Robot Vacuum

Markus Rudel, on his blog, got inspired by my Raspberry Pi and Homebridge article, and decided to set up his Xiaomi Robot Vacuum to work with HomeKit:

I own a Xiaomi Robot Vacuum. This robot can be controlled by the Xiaomi app, however, I don’t like it very much. The idea is to control this robot over HomeKit. To use HomeKit, I use an old Raspberry Pi 1B. The software will be HomeBridge.

While adding your vacuum to your HomeKit setup might not seem as if it makes any sense, since there are little to no benefits from being able to just turn it on or off, it most probably could be automated, e.g. setup to clean the house when everyone leaves it. My cousin has one of these and since he doesn’t have a strict schedule for when he’s at home or away, he’s constantly frustrated by the fact that the vacuum turns on when he doesn’t want it to. Automating this would make most of his problems go away.