Feature request: multiple cleaning passes for whole cleaning

[ephestione]

I was redirected here from the telegram channel, after I asked if there was a way to set multiple cleaning passes with Valetudo. In your build you can do that when defining zones, which is the next best thing, but since my house is not all in the same "angulation", and the zones fall all slanted for more than half of it, without possibility to create custom quadrangular zones, would it be possible to instead just start the plain, whole house cleaning with N number of passes? Thank you for this build ;)

[rand256]

You should probably know that Valetudo is something like a GUI above a native blackbox-like application, which accepts some external commands and could send some data back. And while we can do something useful with a set of those commands and data, it is just impossible to modify an underlying application in terms of changing its command interface and abilities.

So, regarding your question, the command to start the default cleaning AFAIK doesn't have any input parameters, so there's no way to specify the number of passes for it. While it is theoretically possible to launch the default cleaning once, wait for it to complete, then send stop command to prevent the robot from returning to the dock, and then repeat default cleaning command again, Valetudo doesn't support creating such command queues for now. Since, well, it would be less reliable and... do we actually need them?

Couldn't you instead put all your house map into just one huge zone, set required number of passes for it and launch it as zoned cleaning?

[ephestione]

Exactly, that's why it's the next best thing! Though, instead of pulling out my phone, run openvpn because my phone runs better on 4G than the office's own WiFi, open valetudo web interface, select the zone and start the cleaning, I could just raise my heavy bum and go to the robot which is 4 seconds away to manually press the start button :smile: You were clear on the technicalities, though. I recalled that in a past version of MiHome I noticed the possibility to set a multiple number of passes per cleaning, yet I might be wrong!

[S-trace]

Well, but Valetudo can just call "Start cleaning" command, wait for it to complete (when robot have finished cleaning and want to go home) and run "Start cleaning" again without wasting time going to dock (which can happen if the user will schedule 3 consecutive cleanings one after other in 30 minutes (for example).

How about this approach?

[rand256]

What you've described is possible, but I see to reason why one would need that when you can simply make one extra large zone which will include the whole map and clean that instead multiple times, since that's already implemented for many years.

While running multiple passes after starting cleaning by physically pressing a button on the device (which was asked earlier) is a different story.