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  v0.2.0-rc.4 Pre-release

  Cody Bryant released this 2026-08-10 21:16:50 -07:00 | 145 commits to main since this release

  Thanks to @CryingPecan, whose LitterHopper robot
  on ESP 1.4.4 is behind much of what's below.

  Protocol detail for all of the below lives in docs/devices/litter-robot-4/.

  Added

  • The clean cycle is back, and reset with it. Both work by synthesising a
    panel button press — the code the robot already emits when you press it —
    proven on ESP 1.1.75 and independently confirmed on 1.4.4. This reverses the
    0.1.2 removal, which pulled a clean-cycle button built on a byte that never was
    the cycle.
  • Pet weight actually works, and reports the whole cat. It is carried only in
    the activity stream, which was previously used as a poll trigger and thrown
    away — and the raw-to-pounds divisor was inherited, never checked. A weighed
    comparison showed it reporting half: a cat measuring ~8.1 lb came back as 4.08.
  • New entities: last cat visit, last visit duration, waste drawer last moved,
    and panel brightness for bright and dark rooms.
  • Empty cycle and Power buttons, both disabled by default and named
    (danger): an empty cycle dumps the whole globe into the drawer, and Power
    toggles the robot off the network. The CLI gains empty-cycle and power,
    which prompt before sending.
  • LitterHopper support: connected, fill gauge, and an out-of-litter alert the
    firmware itself never raises. The four hopper entities turn themselves on the
    first time a hopper reports; one you disable by hand stays off.
  • Litter percentage calibration. One button press with the globe filled to
    the line anchors the percentage to your robot; a second with it empty upgrades
    to a true two-point scale.
  • Activity-derived entities survive a restart instead of reading unknown
    until the next cat visit or dispense.
  • The documentation gained the sections the quality scale asks for and the
    self-assessment was claiming without them: supported devices, how data is
    updated, what people use it for, and how to remove the integration. hassfest
    skips quality_scale.yaml for custom integrations, so CI now measures
    integration coverage itself and gates the config flow at the 100% the scale
    requires.

  Fixed

  • The filter-change wizard is decoded — its status, both cycle phases, and
    the fact that litter readings during it are meaningless. It cannot be started
    remotely: the panel chord is a long press, and the robot performs short presses
    over MQTT while declining long ones.
  • Every 0x0B annunciator value is named (bonnet, cat, cycle, ready, night
    light, reset), which closes the "random housekeeping chatter" question.
  • robotStatus 10 is the clean cycle, on every firmware. The old map called
    it a cat pause; a narrated live cycle disproved that. Also adds 5, 6/7,
    25, the power-up states 1/2/3, the boot cycle 13, and the filter
    wizard 14. The last two matter: both move or invert the globe, and while
    unmapped their ToF readings were published as real litter levels.
  • The empty-litter calibration button is available without hunting for it. It
    shipped disabled, including for anyone who already had it registered.
  • The weekday sleep schedule now arms every day. That setting is a per-day
    bitmask, not a switch, and turning it on wrote the value for Sunday alone — so
    it appeared to work if you tested on a Sunday and did nothing all week.
  • The cycle phase ladder now runs 2 → 3 → 4 → 5 → 1, so robots no longer
    publish unknown_4 mid-cycle.
  • Litter readings are suppressed while the globe is not level — mid-cycle the
    sensors read the globe, not the litter, and it was published as a real level.
  • Broker failures are reported, not raised as a traceback.
  • The CLI works against a CA generated by this project's own documentation,
    which Python 3.13+ rejected under strict X.509 verification.
  • The panel sleep schedule can now actually be set. The sleep and wake time
    entities wrote a register the firmware only computes, so they never did
    anything; they now write the real per-weekday schedule.
  • Panel sleep mode says what is actually wrong instead of timing out. The
    robot derives it from the weekday sleep schedule, which is the switch to use.
  • The waste-drawer sensor no longer guesses which way the drawer went.
    Breaking: binary_sensor.<robot>_waste_drawer_removed is replaced by
    sensor.<robot>_waste_drawer_last_moved. Nine different codes turned up across
    removals and insertions alike, and a direct read answers the same value either
    way, so the robot reports that the drawer moved and nothing more.
  • One dispense can no longer prove an empty hopper on its own. The floor is
    meant to need corroboration across separate dispenses, but detecting a hopper
    for the first time reloads the entry, and the fresh coordinator started with an
    open deduplication window — so a redelivery of that same first dispense, which
    is exactly when one is most likely to still be in flight, counted as a second
    one. Only ever affected the first dispense of a robot's life, and only robots
    that have a hopper at all.
  • The hopper stops dropping to unknown. A link code we cannot name is no
    longer treated as a disconnect — one such code repeats on a healthy, dispensing
    hopper. Only a proven disconnect changes the state.
  • A multi-register write no longer loses one of its parts. Two commands sent
    back to back were seen landing as one; they are now paced and each is verified.
  • Pet weight can no longer report a cat 100× too heavy. It fell back to a
    state-document field in unknown units that no captured robot actually sends.
  • Panel brightness is verified rather than assumed. The library reported every
    write as successful without checking; it now reads the value back like the rest.
  • pic_firmware, previously always null, composed from the local mb* fields.
  • Entities a previous version created but this one no longer produces are removed
    from the registry instead of lingering forever as unavailable.
  • The example dashboard card no longer lists select.<robot>_clean_cycle_wait_time,
    an entity that stopped existing when that control became a number.
  • whiskerless set night-light-mode auto works. The name-to-number map was
    passed as dict.get's default argument, which Python evaluates eagerly, so
    every spelling the map existed to accept — off, on, auto — raised before
    the lookup could return. It crashed with a traceback rather than an error, and
    it is the exact command in the README quickstart.
  • The library has tests where it had none. The CLI was at 0% despite shipping
    on PyPI, and link.apply_setting — the command line's own copy of the
    write-verify-retry loop — was barely exercised. Adds the destructive-action
    confirmation prompts (including that power has no --yes to skip it), the
    raw send guard path, both transports' retry and give-up behaviour, and the
    safety chokepoint's last two branches, plus BLE provisioning driven end to end
    against a faked radio — the one irreversible thing here, and previously the
    least tested. Library coverage 55% → 99%, with safety.py at 100% and both
    numbers now gated in CI.
  • The invariants that only ran when someone remembered are now tests. The
    version stamper that keeps four release strings in agreement had none, and a
    disagreement there breaks a HACS install with no other symptom. Joined by
    checks that strings.json and the shipped English still match, that every
    entity resolves to a translated name, that quality_scale.yaml still covers
    the real rule list, and that the example automations reference entities that
    exist — each of which caught a real defect by hand first.
  • The declared Home Assistant minimum was wrong. hacs.json said 2025.2.0,
    but every platform imports AddConfigEntryEntitiesCallback, which Home
    Assistant only gained in 2025.3.0. HACS enforces that minimum, so a user on
    2025.2 could install this and watch it fail at import. Nothing caught it
    because the integration tests only ever run against the newest Home Assistant.
  • The write paths are tested. Integration coverage went from 93% to 99% —
    it had been under the 95% the quality scale asks for while claiming to meet it.
    Reads were well covered and writes barely were, which is backwards: a decode
    bug shows a wrong number, a write bug changes the robot. Adds per-platform
    write tests, every panel press, the activity-stream entities, a snapshot of the
    whole entity surface, and the coordinator's retry, timeout, unload and
    broker-not-ready paths. CI now gates the numbers instead of reporting them.
  • The Refresh button ships enabled. It is a read-only state request, and it is
    what the troubleshooting docs tell you to press when a robot has gone quiet —
    being sent to enable an entity first was friction at the worst moment. Existing
    installs get it turned on too, unless you disabled it by hand.

  Changed

  • Both test suites are gated at 99% coverage, up from 98% (library) and 95%
    (integration). The quality scale only asks for 95%; the gates now match what the
    suites actually hold, so a regression fails the build instead of quietly eating
    the headroom. safety.py and the config flow stay at their separate 100%.

  • Last visit duration enables itself, like the hopper entities. It needs ESP
    1.4.4: a 12-hour capture of a 1.1.75 robot logged five cat visits and three pet
    weights without one duration, and on 1.4.4 a weight always comes with a
    duration, so the register is absent rather than the visits being short. It now
    ships disabled and switches on the first time a robot reports one, carrying that
    first reading — rather than being a sensor that reads unknown for the life of a
    1.1.75 robot.

  • Cat detected is documented as following the scale, not the sensors looking
    into the globe, so it can stay on for hours after a cat leaves; the same capture
    spent 29% of its time reporting a cat over an undisturbed litter bed. The entity
    list also gained the four entities that ship but were never listed.

  • The Linux binaries would not have started on Debian 12, RHEL 9 or an older
    Pi OS. PyInstaller freezes the interpreter but links against the build
    machine's glibc, so building on a current Ubuntu quietly required glibc 2.39
    — and nothing noticed, because the binary runs fine on the runner that made
    it. They are now built in a manylinux_2_28 container and a release fails if
    any bundled ELF asks for more than the declared floor.

  • The packages are installed before they are published. The .deb goes on
    Debian 12 and the .rpm on Rocky 9, and the binary is run, before a release
    can carry them — both distros sit above the declared glibc floor and below
    the build runner's, which is the window where this class of bug lives. CI
    also shellchecks the release scripts and fails on a broken documentation
    link, neither of which anything checked before.

  • Linux gets arm64 binaries and real packages. .deb and .rpm for both
    architectures, plus an arm64 build of the standalone provisioner for
    Raspberry Pis and arm servers — the x86_64 binary already shipped. Neither
    package needs a system Python; PyInstaller bundles it, which is the point on
    a laptop that has none.

  • brew install sisyphusmd/tap/whiskerless, with a separate
    whiskerless-rc channel for candidates. A source install into a virtualenv,
    so it needs no notarization and covers macOS and Linux on both architectures
    from one file. The formula checksum is taken from an sdist built locally at
    the tag and then required to match what PyPI serves — a registry download is
    what that checksum exists to protect against, so it is never its source.

  • CI tests what the package advertises, not just what resolves today. The
    library suite now runs on macOS as well as Linux (the provisioner binary
    ships for macOS, and bleak's backend differs by platform), and a new job
    installs the oldest aiomqtt and bleak that pyproject claims to support.
    The Python floor leg now pins 3.11.0 rather than "3.11", which resolved to
    the newest patch and so tested a floor nobody advertises. macOS is tested at
    its oldest and current releases on both architectures. The prerelease gate
    re-checks the floors in their own job, because uv leaves a requirement the
    environment already satisfies alone and would otherwise test latest twice.

  • Release publishing survives its own concurrency. Three workflows race to
    create each release; the helpers did a check-then-create, so a loser hit
    "already exists" and failed the job. They now adopt the winner's release,
    whose notes are the same CHANGELOG section they were about to write.

  • The clean cycle, reset and empty presses no longer need a motor opt-in.
    Breaking (library): Hazard.MOTOR, MotorCommandError and the
    allow_motor argument are gone. Writing the panel button register reproduces
    the code the panel emits, so a written press is the same event as a physical
    one and the robot's own interlocks apply either way. Power still requires
    allow_dangerous.

  • Clean cycle wait time is now a number (3–30 minutes), not a select.
    Breaking: automations using select.<robot>_clean_cycle_wait_time must
    move to number.<robot>_clean_cycle_wait_time.

  • Panel brightness High/Low name the ambient light level, not the brightness
    rank. The stock 40/50 is deliberately brighter at night.

  • isPanelSleepMode and the panel sleep/wake times are documented as read-only:
    the firmware computes all three from the weekday schedule registers.

  • The register map now says what PROVEN has to mean, demotes the rows that never
    earned it, and documents the readable file as 0x00-0x7F with 123 of those 128
    addresses mapped. unitPowerType is pinned (0 = mains, 1 = battery) and
    isUSBPowerOn turns out to mean mains present, not USB. 0x02A10000 returns
    Wi-Fi RSSI only, not the schedule.

  • Releases are never published before the library version they pin exists on
    PyPI, and CI now exercises the Python 3.11 floor it advertises.

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  • whiskerless-macos-arm64.pkg
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