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  v0.2.0-rc.28 Pre-release

  Cody Bryant released this 2026-08-17 21:32:34 -07:00 | 34 commits to main since this release

  The release where the robot stopped being read-only. Whiskerless could always
  watch a Litter-Robot 4 and change its settings; it could not press anything. The
  panel button register turned out to be writable, so Clean cycle and Reset are
  real buttons now — they emit the exact code the panel does, which means the
  firmware's pinch, cat-detect and bonnet interlocks apply to them just as they do
  to a finger. Two other things changed the day-to-day: provisioning no longer
  fails silently when you mistype the WiFi password, and the CLI remembers your
  robots instead of wanting a wall of flags on every command.

  Thanks to @CryingPecan, whose LitterHopper robot
  on ESP 1.4.4 is behind much of what's below. Protocol detail lives in
  docs/devices/litter-robot-4/.

  Breaking changes

  Worth reading before you upgrade; the rest of the list is safe to skim.

  • Broker usernames and passwords are gone. --username, --password and
    WHISKERLESS_PASSWORD no longer exist, and neither does the profile field. The
    robot cannot send credentials at all, so running two authentication schemes
    against one broker only bought complexity — everything identifies by
    certificate now, the CLI included.

  • One broker per machine. The broker, its port and its CA moved off each
    robot and into the store, because every robot in a house talks to the same one.
    --host, --port, --ca and --insecure are gone from the everyday commands
    and live on setup, which is where the broker is established. A genuinely
    separate broker is a separate store: point WHISKERLESS_HOME at it.

  • whiskerless adopt is removed. With the broker no longer per-robot it only
    recorded a serial, and it could never give the robot the certificate it now
    needs. Re-provision instead.

  • The store moved to ~/whiskerless — no leading dot, so the folder you are
    told to back up is one you can find. Your existing ~/.whiskerless is moved
    there automatically the first time you run anything.

  • binary_sensor.<robot>_waste_drawer_removed → sensor.<robot>_waste_drawer_last_moved.
    The robot reports that the drawer moved and never which way, so a binary
    sensor was claiming more than the hardware says.

  • switch.<robot>_panel_sleep_mode → a binary sensor. The firmware refuses
    direct writes to it, so the switch could only ever fail. The weekday schedule
    entities are the control.

  • Clean cycle wait time is a number (3–30 minutes), not a select.

  • Library: Hazard.MOTOR, MotorCommandError and allow_motor are gone. A
    written press is the same event as a physical one, so that gate gated a hazard
    that does not exist — and every caller passed the flag unconditionally, which
    made the real gates look like the same formality. Power still requires
    allow_dangerous.

  • Library: LitterRobot4Client and WhiskerlessAuthError are removed. Nothing
    used them, and the client had become a third, already-drifting copy of the
    write-verify loop.

  • Homebrew gained build dependencies — rust and openssl@3 — because
    certificates became core function and cryptography is a Rust extension that
    Homebrew builds from source. This briefly meant a multi-minute, ~2.4 GB
    install; bottles now make it instant again (see Added), so it only bites on
    a platform we do not bottle. Nothing about the installed result changes, and
    every other install path (PyPI/pipx/uvx, the macOS .pkg, .deb/.rpm) uses
    wheels and was never affected.

  Added

  • Clean cycle and Reset buttons, and they actually work. Proven on ESP 1.1.75
    and 1.4.4. This is the project's first recovered action command; the old "no
    action commands exist" framing is dead.
  • Empty cycle, Power and WiFi, shipped disabled and named (danger) — an
    empty cycle costs a litter refill, and a robot that is switched off, or has had
    its WiFi switched off, has left the network, so nothing over MQTT brings it
    back. WiFi is the panel's Connect button: it took the robot off the broker
    in 0.8 seconds, panel light white, and only a physical press undoes it. The CLI
    gains empty-cycle, power and wifi-toggle; all three prompt first, and the
    two that can end the connection have no --yes.
  • Provisioning verifies the WiFi join. A mistyped passphrase used to sail
    through silently — the robot accepted everything, rebooted, and simply never
    appeared on any network, which is indistinguishable from a dead unit. The robot
    names that failure if asked, so provisioning now polls the join status and stops
    with "mistyped WiFi password" before touching the broker config; a confirmed
    join prints the robot's IP and moves on early. Firmware that stays silent gets
    the old wait.
  • The CLI remembers your robots. provision saves the serial, broker and CA
    under ~/whiskerless; later commands run bare.
    robots, use and forget list, pick and drop them — damaged profiles are
    shown as such and can still be removed.
  • A second robot inherits the saved setup — each prompt offers what your
    robots already share, so you type only the serial and the WiFi password.
  • whiskerless setup is a new command, run once before any robot. It
    establishes your broker's address and its certificates, and prints the three
    files to install on the broker. Deliberately separate from provision:
    between generating those files and a robot being able to use them, somebody has
    to install them and restart the broker — and a robot in pairing mode is holding
    a short window open the whole time. provision now refuses on a machine that
    has not been set up, and says so.
  • whiskerless runs a certificate authority for you. The Litter-Robot cannot
    send a username or a password — its firmware has no field for one, because it
    was built for AWS IoT, which authenticates clients by certificate. So
    certificates are the only authentication it has, and the first provision on a
    machine offers to set the whole thing up: a CA, your broker's server
    certificate, and an identity for this machine. Press enter and it is done. It
    prints the three files your broker needs and which mosquitto directive each one
    goes with. Already have a CA? Point at it with --ca, add --ca-key if you
    want certificates issued here, and it is copied into place under our names.
  • whiskerless backup and whiskerless restore. "Back up ~/whiskerless"
    is advice people follow exactly as often as it is convenient, and the CA
    private key in there is the one thing that cannot be regenerated — losing it
    costs you the ability to add or re-provision a robot without walking to every
    robot you own. backup writes one file; restore puts it back. Leave the
    path off either and it asks — restore lists the backups it can see, newest
    first, and takes a number. Each archive is named for the moment it was made
    and never replaces an earlier one, because that earlier file may be the copy
    from before whatever you are about to change; the timestamp lives in the
    name because it is the only part that survives being copied to a stick or
    pulled out of a snapshot. It offers to
    encrypt (AES-256-GCM, scrypt) and an unattended run has to say --no-password
    or set WHISKERLESS_BACKUP_PASSWORD rather than write a signing key in the
    clear by default. Unencrypted it is an ordinary .tar.gz, because this is a
    file you open once, years later, possibly on a machine with no whiskerless on
    it. restore refuses to replace an existing setup unless you pass --force,
    and the refusal says whether the CA differs and names the robots that would
    stop trusting your broker; --force moves the old store aside rather than
    deleting it.
  • Each robot gets its own certificate, signed by your CA, written over BLE
    exactly the way the Whisker app writes its own — same order, same 100-byte
    chunks, same single apply. Its common name is the robot's serial, so
    use_identity_as_username makes your broker log the robot by name. Nothing
    keeps a copy: the robot holds the only one, and a replacement is one
    re-provision away.
  • Your broker can stop accepting anonymous clients. That was never a
    workaround for a missing feature — it was the only option when the robot had no
    identity of its own to present. Now it has one. Without a CA key to sign with,
    provisioning says so loudly and leaves the robot's factory certificate alone,
    which is exactly how whiskerless worked before.
  • Litter level as a percentage — self-calibrating over time, or pinned
    instantly by one button press with the globe filled the way you consider full.
  • LitterHopper support: connected, fill gauge, and an out-of-litter alert the
    firmware never raises. The entities enable themselves at the first dispense.
  • New entities: last cat visit, last visit duration, waste drawer last moved,
    panel brightness for bright and dark rooms, and excess-weight detection — the
    stuck-scale condition the robot otherwise only shows on its own panel.
  • whiskerless status — the robot in plain terms from a single fresh reading:
    level, drawer, faults, calibration. It names what needs a listener rather than
    printing zeros. whiskerless calibrate full|empty stores your own litter
    reference per robot and refuses a reading that cannot be one, and
    whiskerless panel-reset presses Reset.
  • Activity-derived entities survive a restart instead of reading unknown until
    the next cat visit.
  • New install channels: Homebrew, .deb/.rpm, and standalone Linux binaries
    for amd64 and arm64 — none of which need a system Python.
  • apt and dnf repositories, so Linux installs and upgrades come through the
    package manager instead of a downloaded file. Two channels — stable and
    testing — because version ordering alone cannot keep a candidate away from
    release subscribers until the release it precedes actually exists. Setup, and
    the one-time key import it cannot avoid, is in the README. The packages are
    GPG-signed (4BBACD5A6FF38564); on dnf that signature is what gpgcheck
    verifies, while apt authenticates the repository index Forgejo signs.
  • Homebrew bottles, so brew install pours a prebuilt keg in seconds instead
    of downloading ~2.4 GB of rust and llvm to compile cryptography. Four
    platforms: Apple Silicon and Intel macOS, and Linux on both architectures.
    Anything unbottled still installs exactly as before, just slowly.
  • The CLI shows liveness and colour: a spinner on the BLE scan (heartbeat lines
    when piped), banners on the dangerous prompts, NO_COLOR honoured.
    whiskerless --version works, and a bare whiskerless prints an
    orientation instead of a usage error.
  • The README covers the whole journey: prerequisites, per-platform installs
    including Homebrew, everyday use, upgrading, the rc channel, uninstalling.
  • The integration has an icon and a logo, shipped inside it and served by Home
    Assistant 2026.3+; older versions simply show what they show today.

  Fixed

  • whiskerless setup no longer dies on a machine with a long hostname. The
    certificate it issues for this machine is named whiskerless-<hostname>, and
    X.509 caps a common name at 64 bytes — so a long enough hostname made
    cryptography raise and took the whole command down with a traceback. Names
    are now truncated on a character boundary; the full name still goes in the
    SAN, which is what TLS actually verifies.
  • Moving your broker reissues its certificate. setup --host <new> used to
    record the new address while leaving the old certificate in place, then print
    those same files and tell you to install them — handing the robot a
    certificate naming somewhere it does not connect, which fails every handshake
    and looks exactly like a broken robot. It is reissued when the host changes,
    and says so; without a CA key to sign with, it tells you to replace it
    yourself instead of staying quiet.
  • Provisioning stops scanning the moment it finds your robot. It used to run
    the whole --scan-timeout even after the robot answered — and since a robot
    only advertises while you hold Connect, that spent the pairing window instead
    of using it. One bench attempt found the robot and then failed to connect,
    because it had gone quiet by the time the scan ended.
  • The WiFi check no longer reports 0.0.0.0 as your robot's address. The
    robot says "connected" the instant it associates, before DHCP hands out a
    lease, so the join is confirmed but the address is not yet known — and printing
    the unset one claimed a fact it did not have.
  • Pet weight is right again (raw ÷ 100, the cloud's own units) — recent rc
    builds doubled the reading.
  • The weekday sleep schedule arms every day, not just Sunday, and the panel
    sleep and wake times can actually be set — they now write the per-day
    registers instead of one the firmware only computes.
  • robotStatus 10 is the clean cycle, with the boot cycle and filter wizard
    mapped too. Left unmapped, their readings were published as real litter levels.
  • Litter readings are suppressed while the globe is not level — mid-cycle the
    sensors are looking at the globe, not the litter. The first reading after a
    restart is no longer discarded either.
  • The globe motor fault sensor watches the activity stream, where the fault
    actually appears — the state document sat at 0 through a real fifty-minute
    fault. A restored fault can also clear after a missed clear event, on the proof
    of a clean cycle completing.
  • Cat detection no longer mistakes weight on the scale for a cat — occupancy
    uses the bit that tracks the animal, not the one a misseated bonnet holds — and
    handling the robot no longer counts as a visit.
  • A long cat visit is no longer dropped. The close was matched against a
    90-second window, and the cats that sit longest fell outside it. Last cat
    visit now updates on every robot, stamping from occupancy rather than only
    from weight events, which one robot never sends.
  • Hopper telemetry stopped lying about itself. Detection now means litter was
    actually delivered, because the link register reports healthy on a bench and
    "disconnected" during a refill — so nothing reads it for connectivity any more.
    The level survives a restart instead of reading unknown for days, a robot that
    dispenses but rarely reports its link keeps its telemetry, one dispense cannot
    prove an empty hopper, and the upgrade sweep no longer removes hopper entities
    from a robot that has one.
  • The hopper is now detected at all. A dispense is published as three
    separate messages about twenty seconds apart, and detection insisted on seeing
    them in a single message — a shape no capture has ever shown, on either
    firmware. So the hopper was never sighted: on a fresh install its entities
    stayed disabled forever, robots that kept theirs on older evidence went stale
    instead of updating, and every fill-gauge sample was discarded, so the learned
    scale never moved either. The burst is now assembled across messages, and
    survives a restart landing in the middle of one. A lone diagnostic read of the
    dispense register still proves nothing, which is what the old rule was for.
  • The out-of-litter alert judges against your robot's own learned floor —
    floors differ per unit, and a fixed cutoff could cry empty while litter was
    still flowing.
  • A restored excess-weight alarm clears once the robot reports the pan clear,
    instead of re-firing on every later visit.
  • Event sensors appear only once their fact has been reported. Some firmware
    never emits a drawer event or a weight, and those sensors sat unknown forever; a
    one-time sweep applies the same standard to existing installs — and a detection
    re-sweep no longer disables entities you enabled yourself.
  • brew install sisyphusmd/tap/whiskerless works again (the formula pinned a
    bleak whose build backend Homebrew cannot build), and every release now
    install-tests the formula before the tap publishes.
  • Errors are sentences, not stack traces. A Bluetooth failure reads "BLE scan
    failed: Bluetooth device is turned off"; ~ expands everywhere; every provision
    answer is checked at its prompt, including that the CA really is a PEM; file and
    broker errors print one line. --debug still gives you the traceback.
  • The serial validator rejects the model number (LR4-0301-00-US) printed
    beside the real serial on the label.
  • --dry-run marks everything it prints, so a simulation no longer describes
    writes that never happened.
  • whiskerless set night-light-mode auto works — every accepted spelling used
    to crash.
  • Every settings write is verified by read-back, multi-register writes no
    longer lose parts, and broker failures print instead of raising.
  • Fewer unknowns while calibration settles: the calibration reference shows the
    built-in default (marked as such) and the hopper level a labelled estimate.
  • "A short press does nothing" was wrong, and dangerous. A short press of the
    robot's Connect button toggles its WiFi off — the light bar turns white
    and the robot vanishes from your broker, looking for all the world like a dead
    unit. The README and the recovery guide both told you it was harmless. Hold
    Connect for pairing mode; tap it only to put the radio back.
  • The status a robot reports while powering down is no longer labelled
    "powering up", now that each half of a power cycle has been captured on its
    own rather than together.
  • The waste-drawer register no longer claims to know direction. A brief rule
    ("it speaks on a seat and stays silent on a removal") held on one robot and
    failed on the other; whiskerless still reports only when the drawer last
    moved, which is all the hardware supports.
  • The declared Home Assistant minimum is correct (2025.3.0, not 2025.2.0).

  Changed

  • Some entities were renamed, and existing installs are moved with them:
    Start clean cycle → Clean cycle, the two calibration buttons →
    Calibrate full / Calibrate empty, Hopper fill (raw) → Hopper
    reading, Litter calibration reference → Litter reference. Entity IDs you
    chose yourself are left alone, and every rename is logged — check automations
    that referenced the old IDs.
  • The manual calibration buttons now ship disabled. The robot calibrates
    itself; enable them if you want to pin the scale to a measurement of your own.
  • Last visit duration ships disabled and enables itself at your robot's first
    report — not every robot emits it, and that is not a firmware split.
  • Litter distances read in millimetres, not inches converted to thirteen
    decimal places — the unit the protocol and the docs use. Per-entity overrides
    still win.
  • The raw hopper reading, last dispense and clean-cycle count moved to
    Diagnostics, leaving the sensor list to the things worth a glance.
  • Auto-calibration got a statistics upgrade: a median-based outlier gate keeps
    in-band anomalies (a paw reads like an overfull globe) away from the litter
    anchors, and the hopper floor is learned from declined-into flatline runs — in
    both directions, so a floor that moved up is found as readily as one below.
  • Detections remember what proved them, so tightening one rule can no longer
    cost you entities another rule had already earned.
  • All the derived telemetry moved into the library, which is what will let the
    CLI show everything Home Assistant shows without a second implementation.
  • Release binaries and the macOS installer carry the version in the filename
    (whiskerless-<version>-linux-x86_64); the scheme is in packaging/README.md.

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