Reverting Dreame to stock for servicing

[je-nix]

Are you already using Valetudo?

Yes, for a long time

Your questions

Hi

I have to send in my Dreame L10s Ultra for servicing. After happily running valetudo for 1.5 years, the battery capacity dropped to a point where it sometimes cuts out during cleaning (robot dead). If put back into the dock and the robot boots up again, the battery 'charges' from 15% to 40+% in 5 minutes.
Do you have any experience if the Dreame service (ideally for my case in Switzerland) cares about valetudo installations? I assume I should revert the robots software back to stock / remove valetudo to not get the service claim rejected.
In a previous thread here you linked to the vaers ticketing system to get a custom build with the stock software. But the site is since retired. What do I have to do these days to get my Dreame back to stock?
And assuming I get the same robot back with just the battery replaced, what are the steps to install valetudo again? Do I have to start at the beginning with rooting it?

Thanks for answering all these questions :)

[K0n24d]

I can only tell about my experience in France. Before sending it in, I just flashed the firmware without the DNS/hosts patch.
When i got it back i did a full reset, flashed the patched firmware and installed Valetudo.
I did all the flashing over SSH.

From what I know it’s not possible to return to stock firmware. Even if I wondered if installing an old firmware version and then updating over the vendor app might do the trick. But I didn’t want to take the risk to either brick it or not be able to root it again.

[je-nix]

Thank you for the reply. I did the same thing, build a new version over at dustbin without any host / dns redirects and installed it via SSH on the robot. I don't know in which state it was afterwards (it obviously didn't boot valetudo, but IIRC it booted into AthenaLinux and then sat there) and I'm not sure if this would have been seen as 'normal' / pairable with the manufacturers cloud (probably not). But since the robot never was registered to an account in the first place this would have raised suspicions anyway I guess.
Anyhow, I can unfortunately not provide more information how the Dreame support handles Valetudo devices as the shop (digitec) decided to just refund me (which is nice because I had a great 1.5 years with the robot and Valetudo and can now replace it with the newer L10s Pro).