Welcome to the dustcloud wiki!

You can find a step-by-step guide how to wirelessly root your vacuum robot here.

No, you can root only your own device, devices which are in your own wifi or where you have physical access to (at least for now).

Yes. The devices transfer its connected SSID, the gateway's MAC address and the RSS value every 30 minutes to the cloud. Theoretically you can pinpoint a address very precisely with that information, e.g. by using Google's geolocation API. In addition to that your smartphone transfers its exact position while pairing/provisioning the device with the cloud. The cloud stores that position with the devices dataset.

No, while it can replace technically the cloud, it is not meant to be a full featured control software for your device. With Dustcloud we give developers of open source smart home software (like FHEM, home assistant, etc) the tools to understand how the devices work, so they can develop the proper plugins/interfaces. We do not have resources to support many devices functionally. Reverse Engineering is already hard and time consuming enough ;)

We do not recommend to download and install unknown firmware images, even if it appears to be convenient. Keep in mind that your device is very powerful and has potential access to private data. Our recommended way is to create your firmware yourself. There you have control what changes are made and can make sure that no unwanted "features" are hidden in the image. For all images known to us we provide the MD5 checksum of the encrypted and unencrypted image in the "firmwareversions.xlsx" file.

We may provide a list of MD5 checksums of all files inside the image, so you can check a particular image for integrity and for changes made.

No, dustcloud requires the symmetric key (e.g. extracted from /mnt/default/device.conf) to decrypt the AES connection to the cloud. The same key is used to encrypt the forwarded messages to the cloud. Note: I personally think that Xiaomis approach of device's unique AES key solves a lot of cloud problems: authentication, integrity and confidentiality.

For current rooted device take a look at the device list.

It is also a good idea to subscribe to the dustcloud-documentation repo

There are plans for other devices too. But keep in mind that the devices were financed from my private budget, therefore the focus will be on devices that i will use myself after the hacking. Do not expect a smart fridge (i have a stupid one already) or a smart car (too expensive). However if you have broken devices (like a used Air purifier or something) or spare devices you want to get rid of, you can contact me. I might be interested in some PCBs ;)