Un-cloud your Whisker devices — fully-local MQTT control + telemetry for the Litter-Robot 4 (Python library, CLI, and a Home Assistant integration).
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docs(man): state the pairing-mode cost once in the diagnose entry (it was explained twice in the same paragraph — the second mention now carries only the consequence, that a provision has to follow and that the command asks first)
2026-08-19 22:03:33 -07:00
.forgejo/workflows feat(cli): add whiskerless diagnose, decode the drawer gauge's own disclaimer, and warn that pairing mode wipes the robot's WiFi (a bench night found three things the code could not: the panel says 'blinking blue' and nothing else while the robot knows whether it was refused, could not see the SSID, or joined without a lease — diagnose asks it over BLE and reads nothing else, and is blunt that reaching it needs pairing mode, which causes the very CONNECTING state it usually reports; isDFIResetPending is now decoded, so a drawer level a Reset zeroed is qualified in the CLI and carries level_provisional in HA rather than being published as measured; and entering pairing mode makes the robot forget its network with no button back, which strands cloud users the same way but was documented nowhere here; also retries every setup-python in-step since Forgejo has no rerun API) 2026-08-19 21:59:00 -07:00
.github fix(ble): repair the provisioner no release candidate could have used, and install-test every channel that was still taking our word for it — the detection callback carried its per-round state as default arguments and bleak accepts exactly two parameters, so every scan died on a TypeError the moment it started, on 0.22.0 (the declared floor) as well as current bleak; a factory gives it the same per-round lifetime with the arity bleak demands, and a machine with no Bluetooth now gets a sentence rather than the bare FileNotFoundError the BlueZ backend raises with no D-Bus socket, narrowed so a link dropping mid-session is not blamed on a missing adapter; the Linux matrix gains zypper, pipx, pip, HACS and a provisioning channel that runs the shipped binary far enough to prove the frozen bundle carries the radio stack — which is what caught this — where the HACS channel installs what HACS installs, from the tag, and imports the whole integration against the library its manifest pins on PyPI, and the mirror gains the HACS repository validator beside hassfest 2026-08-18 18:36:06 -07:00
brand docs(readme): give the README a banner that carries its own background, and stop advertising two gaps that closed today (HACS drops the img inside a picture element and rendered the alt text instead of the logo, and no single transparent-wordmark logo reads on GitHub either theme, PyPI light and HACS dark; provision collects the broker username since #63, and status and calibrate landed with #55) 2026-08-15 19:17:50 -07:00
custom_components/whiskerless feat(cli): add whiskerless diagnose, decode the drawer gauge's own disclaimer, and warn that pairing mode wipes the robot's WiFi (a bench night found three things the code could not: the panel says 'blinking blue' and nothing else while the robot knows whether it was refused, could not see the SSID, or joined without a lease — diagnose asks it over BLE and reads nothing else, and is blunt that reaching it needs pairing mode, which causes the very CONNECTING state it usually reports; isDFIResetPending is now decoded, so a drawer level a Reset zeroed is qualified in the CLI and carries level_provisional in HA rather than being published as measured; and entering pairing mode makes the robot forget its network with no button back, which strands cloud users the same way but was documented nowhere here; also retries every setup-python in-step since Forgejo has no rerun API) 2026-08-19 21:59:00 -07:00
docs feat(cli): add whiskerless diagnose, decode the drawer gauge's own disclaimer, and warn that pairing mode wipes the robot's WiFi (a bench night found three things the code could not: the panel says 'blinking blue' and nothing else while the robot knows whether it was refused, could not see the SSID, or joined without a lease — diagnose asks it over BLE and reads nothing else, and is blunt that reaching it needs pairing mode, which causes the very CONNECTING state it usually reports; isDFIResetPending is now decoded, so a drawer level a Reset zeroed is qualified in the CLI and carries level_provisional in HA rather than being published as measured; and entering pairing mode makes the robot forget its network with no button back, which strands cloud users the same way but was documented nowhere here; also retries every setup-python in-step since Forgejo has no rerun API) 2026-08-19 21:59:00 -07:00
examples/litter-robot-4 docs: write the sections the quality-scale self-assessment already claimed (supported devices, data updates, use cases, removal), record 1.4.4 as validated, and fix two examples that outlived the entities they used 2026-08-10 13:06:25 -07:00
packaging docs(man): state the pairing-mode cost once in the diagnose entry (it was explained twice in the same paragraph — the second mention now carries only the consequence, that a provision has to follow and that the command asks first) 2026-08-19 22:03:33 -07:00
scripts docs(lr4): decode the Whisker app's BLE onboarding end to end — it rewrites the device identity on every onboarding, which unblocks #70, and the robot is never identified by serial over BLE 2026-08-16 15:27:22 -07:00
src/whiskerless feat(cli): add whiskerless diagnose, decode the drawer gauge's own disclaimer, and warn that pairing mode wipes the robot's WiFi (a bench night found three things the code could not: the panel says 'blinking blue' and nothing else while the robot knows whether it was refused, could not see the SSID, or joined without a lease — diagnose asks it over BLE and reads nothing else, and is blunt that reaching it needs pairing mode, which causes the very CONNECTING state it usually reports; isDFIResetPending is now decoded, so a drawer level a Reset zeroed is qualified in the CLI and carries level_provisional in HA rather than being published as measured; and entering pairing mode makes the robot forget its network with no button back, which strands cloud users the same way but was documented nowhere here; also retries every setup-python in-step since Forgejo has no rerun API) 2026-08-19 21:59:00 -07:00
tests feat(cli): add whiskerless diagnose, decode the drawer gauge's own disclaimer, and warn that pairing mode wipes the robot's WiFi (a bench night found three things the code could not: the panel says 'blinking blue' and nothing else while the robot knows whether it was refused, could not see the SSID, or joined without a lease — diagnose asks it over BLE and reads nothing else, and is blunt that reaching it needs pairing mode, which causes the very CONNECTING state it usually reports; isDFIResetPending is now decoded, so a drawer level a Reset zeroed is qualified in the CLI and carries level_provisional in HA rather than being published as measured; and entering pairing mode makes the robot forget its network with no button back, which strands cloud users the same way but was documented nowhere here; also retries every setup-python in-step since Forgejo has no rerun API) 2026-08-19 21:59:00 -07:00
.editorconfig feat: initial release — cloud-free local MQTT control + telemetry for the Litter-Robot 4 (typed library, CLI, MQTT-discovery HACS integration, docs, forgejo-first release pipeline) 2026-06-28 17:25:53 -07:00
.gitignore feat(packaging): sign the .deb and .rpm and ship a man page — rpm verifies the package signature against our key (proven: SIGNATURES NOT OK without it, OK with it, Key ID 4bbacd5a6ff38564), apt authenticates repository metadata rather than the embedded _gpgorigin so that half is belt-and-braces, and Debian policy wants both a man page and it compressed since dpkg never gzips one itself 2026-08-17 12:14:07 -07:00
.renovaterc.json docs(packaging): record why PyInstaller is held at 6.22.0 and add the watch that says when it can be lifted (the check landed for a real advisory; only the emulated arm64 build trips it, and Rosetta does not reproduce it, so only a tagged build settles it) 2026-08-15 11:33:20 -07:00
CHANGELOG.md feat(cli): add whiskerless diagnose, decode the drawer gauge's own disclaimer, and warn that pairing mode wipes the robot's WiFi (a bench night found three things the code could not: the panel says 'blinking blue' and nothing else while the robot knows whether it was refused, could not see the SSID, or joined without a lease — diagnose asks it over BLE and reads nothing else, and is blunt that reaching it needs pairing mode, which causes the very CONNECTING state it usually reports; isDFIResetPending is now decoded, so a drawer level a Reset zeroed is qualified in the CLI and carries level_provisional in HA rather than being published as measured; and entering pairing mode makes the robot forget its network with no button back, which strands cloud users the same way but was documented nowhere here; also retries every setup-python in-step since Forgejo has no rerun API) 2026-08-19 21:59:00 -07:00
conftest.py feat(cli): add backup and restore — one optionally-encrypted file for the whole store, because the CA key is the only thing in it that cannot be regenerated and "back up this folder" is advice people follow exactly as often as it is convenient (restore names the robots it would strand rather than quietly replacing a CA they trust) 2026-08-16 20:40:30 -07:00
CONTRIBUTING.md refactor(lib)!: drop LitterRobot4Client and WhiskerlessAuthError (no consumers — the CLI drives the Link and HA rides its own MQTT, so it was a third write-verify copy already drifting; new Link client-id and stream-end pins replace the coverage the deleted tests carried) 2026-08-13 14:44:39 -07:00
hacs.json fix(hacs): declare the Home Assistant minimum the code needs (every platform imports AddConfigEntryEntitiesCallback, added in 2025.3.0, while hacs.json enforced 2025.2.0), and ship arm64 Linux + deb/rpm, a macOS test matrix, and dependency-floor gates 2026-08-10 17:04:35 -07:00
LICENSE feat: initial release — cloud-free local MQTT control + telemetry for the Litter-Robot 4 (typed library, CLI, MQTT-discovery HACS integration, docs, forgejo-first release pipeline) 2026-06-28 17:25:53 -07:00
pyproject.toml refactor!: drop broker username/password entirely and authenticate by certificate — the robot has no field for credentials, so running two auth schemes against one broker only bought complexity 2026-08-16 16:38:23 -07:00
README.md feat(cli): add whiskerless diagnose, decode the drawer gauge's own disclaimer, and warn that pairing mode wipes the robot's WiFi (a bench night found three things the code could not: the panel says 'blinking blue' and nothing else while the robot knows whether it was refused, could not see the SSID, or joined without a lease — diagnose asks it over BLE and reads nothing else, and is blunt that reaching it needs pairing mode, which causes the very CONNECTING state it usually reports; isDFIResetPending is now decoded, so a drawer level a Reset zeroed is qualified in the CLI and carries level_provisional in HA rather than being published as measured; and entering pairing mode makes the robot forget its network with no button back, which strands cloud users the same way but was documented nowhere here; also retries every setup-python in-step since Forgejo has no rerun API) 2026-08-19 21:59:00 -07:00

whiskerless

PyPI Python HACS custom License: MIT


Un-cloud your Whisker devices. Fully-local MQTT control and telemetry for the Whisker Litter-Robot 4 — no cloud account, no internet round-trip, no third-party servers. Your robot talks to your broker, and that's it.

Primary repository: developed at forgejo.bryantserver.com/SisyphusMD/whiskerless. The GitHub copy is a read-only mirror (HACS installs from it). Please file issues and pull requests on GitHub — the Forgejo repository does not take external issues.

Status: beta. The local protocol was recovered by reverse-engineering and validated against a real robot. Re-provisioning, telemetry, and settings are proven on hardware, and the panel actions (clean cycle, reset, empty, power, WiFi) were recovered in August 2026 — see what is not here for what is still open.


Why

Out of the box, a Litter-Robot 4 only works through Whisker's AWS cloud: every status update and every button press makes a round-trip to the internet, and Whisker actively blocks third-party clients. whiskerless cuts the cloud out entirely. The robot keeps its firmware; you just re-point its MQTT trust + broker at your own, over its own BLE provisioning channel — no teardown, no UART, no reflash, and fully reversible.

You get:

  • a Home Assistant integration (HACS) built against the platinum checklist — fully local, push-first, fully typed. (The quality scale is only awarded to core integrations, so that is the bar it was written to, not a badge it holds.)
  • a whiskerless CLI + Python library to provision, monitor, read, and control a robot directly;
  • a complete, public protocol reference — the first published map of the LR4 local MQTT protocol.

What using it looks like

One guided session, next to the robot, and you never touch it again:

$ whiskerless setup
broker IP (e.g. 192.168.1.10): 192.168.1.10

  NO CERTIFICATE AUTHORITY ON THIS MACHINE

  Your robot has to be told which broker certificate to trust, and that
  means a certificate authority. There is no way around it.

    1  Generate one for me (recommended)
    2  I already have one — I will give you the files

  Which? [1]:
✓ generating a certificate authority — done

  Your broker needs three files:

    ~/whiskerless/ca/ca.crt          →  cafile
    ~/whiskerless/broker/server.crt  →  certfile
    ~/whiskerless/broker/server.key  →  keyfile

  Back up ~/whiskerless somewhere safe. It holds the key that signs
  certificates for your robots.

  Next: install the files above on your broker, restart it, then
  whiskerless provision with a robot in pairing mode.


$ whiskerless provision
robot serial (the unhyphenated LR4C… line on the label, …): LR4C123456

  Hold Connect on the robot now until its light
  BLINKS YELLOW (about three seconds) — that is pairing mode — and
  keep holding until the numbered steps below start. It only
  advertises while you hold, and the link is opened after the
  scan finds it.

⠹ scanning for robots over BLE — done (3s)
   1 ▸ connected to F8:B3:B7:xx:xx:xx (MTU=500, cert chunk=100)
   2 ▸ endpoints: ['mqtt-config', 'proto-ver', 'prov-config', 'prov-scan', …]
   3 ▸ device MAC: f8:b3:b7:xx:xx:xx
   4 ▸ asking the robot which networks it can see

  networks the robot can see, strongest first:
   * = password required   |||| = signal AT THE ROBOT   ch = channel

    0  MyIoT                            * |||| ch 6
    1  HomeNet                          * |||| ch 1
    2  Guest                              ||   ch 11
    -  my network is not listed — type its name (hidden SSID)

select a network by number (0-2), or - to type a hidden one: 0
WiFi password for 'MyIoT':

  RE-PROVISION — this re-points the robot away from Whisker's cloud
    robot    F8:B3:B7:xx:xx:xx (MAC f8:b3:b7:xx:xx:xx)
    serial   LR4C123456
    broker   192.168.1.10
    wifi     MyIoT
    identity issued by your CA, CN=LR4C123456
    reversible — re-onboard the robot in the Whisker app

Proceed? Type 'yes': yes
   5 ▸ DEVICE_ID_SET LR4C123456
   6 ▸ WiFi SetConfig+Apply ssid=MyIoT; verifying join (≤20s)
   7 ▸ WiFi connected (ip=192.168.1.42)
   8 ▸ endpoints: host=192.168.1.10 sub=prod/LR4/LR4C123456/command
   9 ▸ CERT_AWS_ROOT_CERT written (1188 bytes)
  10 ▸ CERT_DEVICE_CERT written (1493 bytes)
  11 ▸ CERT_DEVICE_KEY written (1704 bytes)
  12 ▸ APPLY_CONFIG committed
  13 ▸ DEVICE_REBOOT

reprovisioned; the robot should reconnect MQTT to 192.168.1.10

  saved as LR4C123456 — later commands need no flags:
    whiskerless state

(A second robot is much shorter — the broker and the certificate authority are already settled, so it asks only for the serial and which network to join.)

The robot reboots, joins your broker, and from then on every check and every button press is local:

whiskerless state          # full decoded status, on demand
whiskerless monitor        # live telemetry as it happens

— and if you run Home Assistant, the robot appears on its own as a discovered device the moment it reaches the broker. Fourteen sensors, the buttons, and every writable setting, all local.

What you need

Physical prerequisites, gathered up front — everything else is prompted for:

  • The robot's serial, printed on its label (also in the Whisker app under the robot's settings). The label carries two lines that both start with "LR4"; the serial is the unhyphenated one:

    LR4C123456      ← the serial (LR4C + six digits) — this is what you type
    LR4-0301-00-US  ← the model number — not per-unit, not accepted
    

    The serial becomes the robot's MQTT identity, so it must match the label exactly.

  • An MQTT broker on your LAN with TLS (port 8883) that you control — Mosquitto in a container, the HA add-on, anything. Setup, including making the certificates, is walked through in docs/setup/mqtt-broker.md and docs/setup/certificates.md.

  • Your CA certificate as a PEM file — the one that signed the broker's certificate. You created it during broker setup; it gets written into the robot, which then trusts your broker and nothing else.

  • The WiFi network and password the robot should join (2.4 GHz).

  • A computer with Bluetooth within a few meters of the robot, for the one-time provisioning. macOS, Linux, or Windows — installs below.

How it works (30 seconds)

  BLE (one-time)        re-point trust + broker          runtime (forever after)
  your laptop  ───►  CA + host + topics over protocomm  ───►  robot ──MQTT/TLS──► your broker ──► Home Assistant

The robot stores all of its cloud identity in NVS and exposes esp-idf protocomm provisioning over BLE with no PIN. whiskerless writes your CA into its root-CA slot, your broker as its host and topics, and your WiFi details, then commits. From then on the robot connects to your broker over TLS and speaks plain JSON — requestState, settings writes, and a live telemetry stream. Full detail in docs/how-it-works.md.

Install

Home Assistant (HACS)

  1. HACS → ⋮ → Custom repositories → add https://github.com/SisyphusMD/whiskerless as an Integration.
  2. Install Whiskerless, restart Home Assistant.
  3. Make sure Home Assistant's MQTT integration is connected to your broker.
  4. Provision each robot onto that broker (below). It then appears on its own under Settings → Devices & Services as a Discovered device — click Add and give it a name. No broker details or serials to type.

See docs/setup/ for the broker, certificate, and discovery details.

The provisioning CLI

Runs on the computer near the robot. Every channel ships the same tool; none of them needs a system Python except PyPI's.

Homebrew (macOS and Linux):

brew install sisyphusmd/tap/whiskerless

macOS signed installer — download the .pkg for your chip from the releases (whiskerless-<version>-macos-arm64.pkg for Apple Silicon, …-x86_64.pkg for Intel) and double-click. It's signed and notarized by Apple, so there's no "unidentified developer" warning. The first time it scans, macOS asks to let your terminal use Bluetooth — allow it.

Debian, Ubuntu, Raspberry Pi OS (64-bit) — an apt repository, so upgrades arrive with the rest of the system:

sudo install -d /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://forgejo.bryantserver.com/api/packages/SisyphusMD/debian/repository.key \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/whiskerless.asc >/dev/null
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/whiskerless.asc] https://forgejo.bryantserver.com/api/packages/SisyphusMD/debian stable main" \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/whiskerless.list >/dev/null

sudo apt update && sudo apt install whiskerless

That first step is the one part that cannot come from the repository: apt will not install a package to obtain the key it needs to trust that package. Fetch it over HTTPS once and apt verifies everything afterwards on its own.

Swap stable for testing to track release candidates. A release lands in both, so a testing subscriber receives it too and is never stranded on the last candidate.

(No 32-bit build — a Pi on 32-bit Raspberry Pi OS should use the PyPI route below.)

Fedora, RHEL — a dnf repository:

sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo \
  https://forgejo.bryantserver.com/SisyphusMD/whiskerless/raw/branch/main/packaging/whiskerless.repo

sudo dnf install whiskerless

(whiskerless-testing.repo in place of whiskerless.repo tracks release candidates. On dnf4, --add-repo is the same flag; on dnf5 it is dnf config-manager addrepo --from-repofile=<url>.)

That file pins our signing key, 4BBACD5A6FF38564, and dnf verifies every package against it on every install. Do not substitute the .repo file Forgejo generates at …/rpm/stable.repo: it names Forgejo's own key, which cannot verify a package we signed, so the install fails with GPG check FAILED. Adding that key alongside ours "to be safe" is worse still — dnf accepts a package signed by any listed key, which would let the machine hosting the packages sign its own.

openSUSE: the same repository —

sudo rpm --import https://forgejo.bryantserver.com/SisyphusMD/whiskerless/raw/branch/main/packaging/whiskerless-signing-key.asc
sudo zypper install ./whiskerless-<version>.x86_64.rpm

The repository is apt and dnf only. zypper insists on verifying the repository index even with repo_gpgcheck=0 (checked — it fails with Signature verification failed for repomd.xml), and the key that would satisfy it is Forgejo's, which we deliberately do not ask you to trust. Downloading the .rpm and verifying it against our key is the same guarantee without that trade.

A single file instead — every .deb and .rpm is also attached to each release, if you would rather not point a package manager at another host:

sudo apt install ./whiskerless_<version>_amd64.deb     # arm64 for a Pi
sudo dnf install ./whiskerless-<version>.x86_64.rpm    # aarch64 for ARM

Verify one before installing it with rpm -K ./whiskerless-<version>.x86_64.rpm (after importing the key above) or against the release's SHA256SUMS. Note that dpkg/apt do not check package signatures for a local file at all — that is what the repository above is for.

Raw Linux binarywhiskerless-<version>-linux-x86_64 / …-arm64 from the same releases page:

chmod +x ./whiskerless-<version>-linux-x86_64
./whiskerless-<version>-linux-x86_64 provision

Windows — no standalone binary, but the PyPI CLI works natively; bleak drives Windows' built-in Bluetooth:

uvx --from 'whiskerless[ble]' whiskerless provision

(Don't run the Linux binary under WSL: WSL can't reach the Bluetooth adapter, so provisioning won't work there.)

PyPI — one-shot with no install, or on your PATH:

uvx --from 'whiskerless[ble]' whiskerless provision   # one-shot
pipx install 'whiskerless[ble]'                       # CLI on PATH (provisioning included)
pip install 'whiskerless[ble]'                        # library + BLE provisioning

The releases live on Forgejo (primary) and the GitHub mirror — same artifacts either way.

Set up this machine

Once, before any robot:

whiskerless setup

It asks for your broker's address, offers to create a certificate authority, and prints the three files to install on your broker. Install them and restart the broker before going further — that is why this is a separate command from provision: a robot in pairing mode holds a short window open, and it should not be spent waiting on a broker restart.

Provision the robot

🚨 Holding Connect wipes the robot's saved WiFi. Only finish this if you are going to complete the provision.

The moment it enters pairing mode the robot forgets its network — that part is Whisker's own documented behaviour. On the unit we tested (ESP 1.1.75) it did not come back on its own: the mode showed no sign of timing out, no button we tried left it, and the robot stayed off the network entirely — not merely unreachable, but not answering ARP on its own VLAN — until a provision completed. Treat the "no way out but a provision" part as one robot's behaviour rather than a firmware-wide guarantee, and plan accordingly.

This is the robot's behaviour, not something whiskerless does. Whisker documents it for their own app too: holding Connect too long means the robot "has entered onboarding mode and forgotten its saved WiFi network", and their recovery is the app's Update Network flow. whiskerless provision is ours. The practical difference is distance to the cure — theirs is a phone tap, ours needs this laptop within Bluetooth range of the robot.

Put the robot in pairing mode — hold its Connect button for about three seconds, until the light blinks yellow — then, near it:

⚠️ Hold it, do not tap it. A short press toggles the robot's WiFi off. The light turns white and the robot vanishes from your broker, which looks exactly like a dead unit. Press Connect once more to bring it back. A short press does not leave pairing mode, whatever Whisker's support pages say — observed three times out of three on hardware.

whiskerless provision

It prompts for everything in What you need, checks each answer as you give it, shows exactly what it is about to write, and asks before touching anything. When it finishes, the robot reboots onto your broker; whiskerless state is the proof. Add --dry-run to watch the whole flow with nothing written.

That's the only step that needs details. whiskerless remembers your broker, your CA and each robot under ~/whiskerless, so everything afterwards is bare. Provisioning a second robot only asks for its serial and which network it should join — the broker and the CA are already settled.

whiskerless sets up the certificates for you. The robot cannot send a username or a password — it was built for AWS IoT, which authenticates by certificate — so certificates are the only authentication it has. The first provision on a machine offers to create a certificate authority, your broker's server certificate, and an identity for this machine. Press enter and it is done; it then prints the three files your broker needs:

  ~/whiskerless/ca/ca.crt          →  cafile
  ~/whiskerless/broker/server.crt  →  certfile
  ~/whiskerless/broker/server.key  →  keyfile

Already have a CA? Choose "I already have one" and give it the certificate and its key, or pass --ca with --ca-key. By default whiskerless issues every robot a certificate of its own, and that needs something to sign with, so a certificate on its own is refused rather than half-configuring the machine.

Keep your signing key somewhere else — cert-manager, Vault, an offline root? whiskerless setup --auth supplied --ca ca.crt --client-cert … --client-key …, then hand each robot its certificate at provisioning time with --robot-cert and --robot-key. The signing key never reaches this machine. Rarer still, --auth anonymous leaves every robot the certificate it shipped with, which means the broker's listener has to accept anonymous clients. Both are recorded in your store, so every command afterwards behaves the same way without the flags. See docs/design/authentication.md.

Back up ~/whiskerless. It holds the key that signs certificates for your robots. Losing it does not stop robots that already work; it costs you the ability to add or re-provision one without visiting every robot you own. The WiFi passphrase is never stored anywhere — it is asked for while you are standing at the robot, and that is the only time it is needed.

whiskerless backup ~/Documents      # one file: your CA, broker and robots
whiskerless restore <that file>     # on the machine that replaces this one

Leave the path off either one and it asks — restore lists the backups it can see and takes a number. It offers to encrypt the file, and asks before it would write your signing key in the clear. Unencrypted it is an ordinary .tar.gz, so tar can open it on a machine that has never heard of whiskerless.

Each backup is named for the moment it was made (whiskerless-backup-20260816-204915.tar.gz) and never replaces an earlier one — that earlier file may be the copy from before whatever you are about to change. The timestamp is in the name because it is the only part that survives being copied to a stick or pulled out of a snapshot; modification time becomes "just now" for every file at once. restore will not replace a setup that is already there unless you pass --force, and it tells you first which robots that would strand.

Everyday use

Most people live in Home Assistant afterwards — see docs/setup/home-assistant.md for the entities and what they mean. The CLI covers the same ground from a terminal — the everyday controls, the raw telemetry, and the derived view of what the robot is actually doing:

Anything that talks to the robot needs a route to your broker. Provisioning is Bluetooth, and robots, use and forget only touch files on your machine — but state, monitor, set, status and the buttons all open an MQTT connection. If your robots live on an isolated IoT VLAN, your everyday machine may have no way in. A cannot reach broker at …:8883 (timed out) is most often that boundary rather than a whiskerless fault — though a wrong host or port, a stopped broker or a firewall look identical from here, so check those too. Home Assistant is already on that network, which is why it stays the control surface for most people.

whiskerless status                       # the robot in plain terms, one reading
whiskerless state                        # full decoded status
whiskerless monitor                      # live telemetry (ctrl-c to stop)
whiskerless calibrate full               # store your own litter reference
whiskerless set night-light-mode auto    # writes, then reads back to confirm
whiskerless clean-cycle                  # start a cycle (asks first)
whiskerless robots                       # every robot saved on this machine
whiskerless use LR4Cxxxxxx               # pick the default of several
whiskerless state --serial LR4Cyyyyyy    # or name one per command
whiskerless backup ~/Documents           # your CA and robots, in one file

When a robot will not stay on WiFi, the panel tells you almost nothing — a blinking light, and that is it. The robot itself knows more, and Bluetooth still works when the network does not:

whiskerless diagnose                     # ask the robot why (read-only)

Expect it to be inconclusive more often than not. Reaching the robot needs pairing mode, and pairing mode takes it off WiFi — so the most common answer is the robot reporting that it is trying to connect, which is the state this command itself put it in. It says so plainly rather than dressing that up as a finding.

When it does have something, it is worth the trip: refused (a wrong passphrase, or an access point turning it away), the network not found (it cannot see that SSID from where it sits — it is 2.4 GHz only), or joined but never given an address (look at DHCP, not the password). Those are verdicts the robot volunteers about an attempt it already made, so pairing mode does not confound them.

⚠️ It needs pairing mode to reach the robot over Bluetooth, and entering that mode makes the robot forget its saved WiFi. So it asks first, and you must follow it with a provision. Run it on a robot that is already failing — not as a routine check.

There are no per-command broker flags: one machine points at one broker, behind one CA, and a flag naming a different one would still present this store's certificates — so it could only fail confusingly. A genuinely separate broker is a separate store; set WHISKERLESS_HOME to it. whiskerless forget <serial> drops a robot's saved details; the robot keeps running. whiskerless --help lists the rest — including read and send for protocol work.

Upgrading from 0.1.3

Your robots keep working while you read this. Nothing reaches them until you provision one.

What moves by itself. The store is renamed from ~/.whiskerless to ~/whiskerless the first time any command runs, and the broker address and CA certificate that used to live inside each robot's profile are hoisted to the store, where they now belong to the machine rather than to a robot. Settings 0.2.0 stopped reading are dropped from those profiles at the same time, so what is left on disk is what is actually in use. It is a rename, not a copy — there is never a second store to edit by mistake.

What breaks: the CLI's broker login. Broker usernames and passwords are gone — --username, --password and WHISKERLESS_PASSWORD no longer exist, and the stored username is ignored. The robot never could send credentials, so certificates are the only scheme that ever covered both halves. If your broker demands a username on the listener the CLI uses, whiskerless state will fail after upgrading and no flag will bring it back: let that listener accept this machine's certificate instead, or leave it anonymous. Provisioning is unaffected — that is Bluetooth.

What you have to decide once: where the signing key is. 0.2.0 issues every robot a certificate of its own, so the store has to be able to sign. After migrating it holds your CA's certificate but not its key — the key was never in there. The next whiskerless setup therefore asks, and the answer decides whether anything has to be re-provisioned:

You still have the CA key File it. Nothing is re-provisioned — the robots already trust that authority, and only the ones you choose to re-provision change at all.
You do not A new authority is generated, and every robot must be re-provisioned before it can verify your broker again.

A certificate with no key is no longer a state the store will sit in. It was one until 0.2.0, and it read exactly like a finished setup while quietly declining to issue anything — which is only discovered with a robot in front of you.

Then the broker. Whichever answer you gave, install the CA and server certificate setup prints and restart the broker; it reads certificates only at startup. Once every robot carries an identity, switch the LR4 listener from anonymous to require_certificate true, allow_anonymous false and use_identity_as_username true — then an unknown client is refused instead of trusted for reaching the port, and each robot is logged by its serial.

Order matters: every robot first, confirmed talking, and only then tighten the listener. A robot still holding its factory certificate is refused with nothing on the robot to say why. Anything else on that listener needs an identity too — see the broker guide.

What it costs. A trip to each robot, because the certificate is written over Bluetooth with the robot in pairing mode and there is no remote path; plus one broker config change and a restart. You can stop after the key question and leave the listener anonymous — that is still supported, and is how the robot arrives from the factory.

Upgrading

  • Home Assistant: HACS shows the update; install it and restart HA. The integration pins the exact library version it was released with, so the pair always upgrades together.
  • Homebrew: brew upgrade whiskerless.
  • macOS .pkg: download the newer .pkg and double-click — it installs over the old one in place.
  • .deb / .rpm: sudo apt upgrade whiskerless / sudo dnf upgrade whiskerless if you added the repository; otherwise install the newer file the same way as the first one.
  • PyPI: pipx upgrade whiskerless / pip install -U whiskerless.

whiskerless --version says what is on your PATH.

Release candidates (and switching back to stable)

Release candidates go out before each stable release for testing on real hardware:

  • Homebrew: brew install sisyphusmd/tap/whiskerless-rc tracks the newest candidate (it conflicts with the stable formula — one or the other). When the stable release lands, the rc formula is re-pointed at it, so staying on whiskerless-rc converges to stable by itself; to switch channels explicitly, brew uninstall whiskerless-rc && brew install sisyphusmd/tap/whiskerless.
  • HACS: in the integration's page, ⋮ → Redownload and enable showing beta versions to pick a candidate; redownload again without it to go back to stable.
  • Releases page: candidates are marked pre-release and never "latest".

Uninstalling

The robot needs nothing installed anywhere to keep running — these only remove the tools:

  • Home Assistant: Settings → Devices & Services → Whiskerless → ⋮ → Delete (per robot), then uninstall Whiskerless in HACS and restart. The full walkthrough is in docs/setup/home-assistant.md.
  • Homebrew: brew uninstall whiskerless (or whiskerless-rc).
  • macOS .pkg: sudo rm /usr/local/bin/whiskerless — the installer places that one file.
  • .deb / .rpm: sudo apt remove whiskerless / sudo dnf remove whiskerless.
  • PyPI: pipx uninstall whiskerless / pip uninstall whiskerless.

Your certificate authority and saved robots stay in ~/whiskerless; delete that folder to remove them. Run whiskerless backup first if you ever want to add a robot without re-provisioning every one you own. To put a robot back on the Whisker cloud, re-onboard it in the Whisker app — the round trip is proven and documented in docs/recovery.md.

Safety first

This library talks straight to a robot's controller, and some opcodes can reset it or, in the worst case, brick a control board. So it guards every send:

  • Four opcodes are refused unconditionally (0xA3, 0xA4, 0xAC, 0xAD — reset / main-board-OTA orchestrator, globe-motor OTA, flash erase, hardware reset). No flag lets them through.
  • The destructive panel combos are refused too — factory reset, plug pull and onboarding mode are all one write away from the clean cycle, so 0x01 is whitelisted by value, not opened as a register.
  • Power and WiFi need an explicit opt-in, because a robot that is switched off, or has had its radio switched off, has left the network — and nothing over MQTT reaches it there.
  • Untraced / control-band / calibration writes are refused unless you override them on purpose.

The routine presses — clean cycle, reset, empty — are ungated. Writing the panel button register reproduces the exact code the panel emits, so the robot cannot tell it from a finger, and the firmware's pinch, cat-detect and bonnet interlocks apply either way.

The guard lives in safety.py and both the CLI and the integration funnel through it — see docs/devices/litter-robot-4/.

What is not here

The filter-change wizard, and it is not coming. Its panel chord is a long press, and the firmware performs short presses over MQTT while silently declining long ones — so every hold-only function is out of reach by this route. Whisker's own cloud has no long-press command either; it reaches those settings by writing registers, which is what whiskerless already does for panel lockout, the night light, the cycle delay and the sleep schedule.

Empty, Power and WiFi ship disabled by default. Power is now proven — written to a live robot, which powered off and emitted the same code a finger does — but it still ships disabled, because a robot switched off has left the network and only someone standing at it can bring it back. WiFi (the panel's Connect button) ends the same way and gets there in under a second: the robot was gone 0.8 s after the write, panel light white. Empty's code is captured from a physical press and has still never been written; it costs a litter refill to try. Enable them deliberately or use the CLI (empty-cycle, power, wifi-toggle), which prompts — and for the two that can end the connection, --yes does not exist.

See the reverse-engineering writeup. Contributions welcome.

Repository layout

whiskerless/
├─ src/whiskerless/            # the pip library (codec, MQTT, BLE, safety, CLI)
│  └─ devices/litter_robot_4/  # LR4 protocol: codec, commands, state model, link
├─ custom_components/whiskerless/  # the Home Assistant integration (depends on the lib)
├─ docs/                       # protocol reference + setup + recovery guides
├─ examples/                   # example automations
└─ tests/                      # codec / safety / command / integration tests

Documentation

Adding another Whisker device

The library is structured so a new robot drops in under src/whiskerless/devices/<x>/ (codec + commands + state model) and custom_components/whiskerless/devices/<x>.py, reusing the shared MQTT transport, BLE provisioning, and safety guard. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

MIT. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Whisker. "Litter-Robot" is a trademark of its respective owner; this project is independent and interoperates with hardware you own.