Now it’s a week since the problems with their cloud service regarding voice commands with Vector became obvious because of more and more posts by users that no longer have a lifetime or subscription, and still there is no official statement on that
While there still is no official statement on DDL’s ongoing Vector service outages and the account mixups, one user got an email by DDL CEO Jacob Hanchar.
Since the day before yesterday a lot of users report that some of their Vector robots no longer react to voice commands. At first it looked as if every robot was affected, but then we …
Digital Dream Labs promised something called OSKR, that is an acronym for Open Source Kit for Robots, in their Kickstarter campaign that closed in March 2020 and raked in half a million Dollars. They promised to open source the firmare of Vector the robot, so everyone would be able to create “open Vector builds” or new functions for Vector.
It is now nearly three years after the successful end of Digital Dream Lab’s Kickstarter campaign that was deceivingly called “Vector Unleashed”.
After the last stunt Digital Dream Labs pulled – copyright trolling the Loona campaign (fortunately that failed) – a lot of people were unhappy with DDL and took their frustration to Google reviews (and other review platforms around the internet).
There are multiple (read: a lot!) reports of first generation Vectors overheating way faster and that have way higher head and body temperatures after they were forcibly updated to firmware 2.0.0 by Digital Dream Labs.
I tested to install Wire-Pod, Wire’s open source Escape Pod onto a Raspberry Pi 4, as recommended. There were some problem that I was able to solve with Wire’s help (thanks for that!) and some improvements were added to the installation process because of it.
Thanks to the ingenuity of Wire you are now able to tether any production Vector to his Open Source Escape Pod, so far that was only possible with OSKR bot.
I am getting reports by multiple people who say their 1.6 firmware Vectors were updated to 1.8.x, even robots that are not on any subscription, and even robots that were on the downgrade offered by DDL in the past.
First: So, what is a jailbreak?
Let me quote a paragraph from Wikipedia:
There are a number of updates for the open source Escape Pod solution that Wire provided using the open sourced libraries for Chipper and Vector cloud.
Wire did more work on his Open Source Escape Pod and since it came a long way since the alpha it was now renamed wire-pod.
From Saturday, june 4th 2022, on there are cloud service problems with the servers that run Vector’s voice recognition.
Wire just released a kind of early alpha for an Open Source Escape Pod on Github. He used the chipper and vector-cloud repositories that were provided by DDL on Github some time ago.
Yesterday Digital Dream Labs held their quarterly “State Of Robotics” video conference. Here are the news regarding Vector:
In past “State Of Robotics” Zoom conferences and subsequent Youtube videos Digital Dream Labs showed the above chart multiple times.
Digital Dream Labs managed to show the underside of a robot that most probably is a Vector 2.0 and that shows the new battery lid.
In their ongoing crusade to make the lifes of Vector users everywhere miserable, Digital Dream Labs reached another milestone.
The short answer is: most probably not. But a longer answer will now follow. Be aware of the fact that I am not a lawyer (but have some knowlegde about tech-related laws because of my …
