Local smart home this week: Roborock vacuums run without Roborock's cloud, and the 2016 Echo Dot goes local

Four items this week. The biggest is a way to keep a Roborock vacuum fully working with its internet cut off, with no rooting.

Roborock vacuums can now talk to a server on your own network

Roborock Local Server stands in for Roborock’s cloud: you point the vacuum’s DNS at it and it gets its HTTPS and MQTT connections from a box on your LAN instead. Version 1.2.0 shipped on September 27 as the current stable build, from one of the maintainers of Home Assistant’s own Roborock integration; he says he released it in beta about six months ago and has since ironed out a lot of the earlier problems. The project’s beta add-on still sits on 1.1.0-rc2. The README gives the reason it exists: Roborock sends maps only through its cloud, and a vacuum that can’t reach Roborock keeps restarting its network connection, which kills local control. With the server, live maps and room cleaning keep working offline, and there’s no disassembly or rooting; resetting the vacuum’s Wi-Fi puts it back to stock pairing. Version 1.2.0 also adds onboarding a vacuum that has never had a cloud account.

Local impact: more local. My robot vacuum guide says the native Roborock integration keeps a cloud dependency, and for anyone willing to run this server that’s no longer the whole story.

The catch: setup is not light. You need a domain you control, local DNS rewriting (Pi-hole, AdGuard Home or your router), a valid SSL certificate and a second computer with Wi-Fi for onboarding. Entry-level Q-series models such as the Q7 aren’t supported, and China-market units don’t work outside China. The project’s tested list includes the Qrevo MaxV I own, but I haven’t tried the server with it.

The 2016 Echo Dot gets a whole new operating system

A developer released postmarketOS for the Echo Dot 2nd gen (model RS03QR), version 1.0, on September 30. It replaces Fire OS entirely, so Alexa is gone, and runs Home Assistant’s voice satellite with an on-device wake word (“Alexa” by default), all seven microphones, and Music Assistant playback through Sendspin. Home Assistant finds it the way it finds a Voice Preview Edition. The installer copies the chip firmware and audio tuning off your own Echo, so nothing of Amazon’s is redistributed.

Local impact: more local. Last week it was the 2018 Dot; this is the generation before it.

The catch: you first unlock the Dot with the amonet exploit and install Fire OS 6, and the author warns of a real brick risk. It has been tested on two units. Security is basic by the author’s own account: the setup hotspot is an open network, the ESPHome API has no encryption key and the settings page is plain HTTP.

AirBee: a battery CO2 sensor for Zigbee or Bluetooth

Sensy-One announced AirBee, a battery-powered CO2 sensor that uses a Senseair Sunrise for real NDIR CO2 readings, plus temperature, humidity and pressure. You pick Zigbee (ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT) or Bluetooth LE through BTHome with a button; one mode runs at a time. It reports every five minutes, and the maker projects at least 10 years from its 3,600 mAh lithium cell, based on measured current published on GitHub rather than years of use. It’s listed at EUR 129.95 and is expected to ship between mid and late October.

Local impact: more local. A battery CO2 sensor that pairs straight to ZHA, Zigbee2MQTT or BTHome fills a gap in my air quality sensor guide, where the battery Zigbee pick doesn’t measure CO2 at all. I haven’t run one.

ActronAir QUE ducted air conditioning goes local

A new Home Assistant app, Actron QUE Local, controls ActronAir QUE systems over the local network instead of through ActronAir’s cloud. It talks to the QUE wall controller in its own WallLink protocol, appearing as one more wall controller, and publishes everything to Home Assistant over MQTT: the main system and each zone as climate entities, fan speed, setpoints, quiet and away modes, filter status and compressor data. The code is on GitHub.

Local impact: more local. The author calls it relatively new and is asking owners with other QUE setups to test it.

Sources

1. Roborock Local Server v1.2.0 release on GitHub, 27 September 2026
2. Home Assistant community, 27 September 2026: Local Roborock Server
3. r/homeassistant, 30 September 2026: postmarketOS for the Echo Dot 2nd gen v1.0
4. r/homeassistant, 1 October 2026: AirBee battery CO2 sensor announcement
5. Home Assistant community, 27 September 2026: Actron QUE Local

Every fact above comes from these sources, checked Oct 2, 2026. A launch brief is written before hands-on testing; the "what I verified" box says what is confirmed and what is not.