Possibility to use a robot completely offline

[MI-KY]

Are you already using Valetudo?

No, but planning to do it in the near future

Your questions

Hi,
I would like to start with Valetudo but have a specific question: in m situation wifi is available for configuration but would not cover the whole area and sometime even the "dock" of the robot would not have wifi all the time. There also isn't any kind of smart home server installed.

I'm asking myself if in such a situation a robot could start his cleaning cycles based on preset times or wouldn't this not work?

[Hypfer]

While offline (as in internet connectivity) usage is not only possible but the main idea behind Valetudo, it is required to join the robot to a WiFi network and, for timers to work, allow it to sync its time via the NTP client built into Valetudo.

This could for example be achieved with a raspberry pi running ntpd and hostapd, though there are also many other solutions.

Valetudo will stop executing timers when the time sync fails, so if the dock is outside of the coverage of the WiFi network, timers might only work intermittently.

[MI-KY]

Thanks for your answer!
Will Valetudo stop the timer execution immediately at the first fail of ntp connection or could it work say for a week before it stops? For me a very exact execution of cleaning would not be a critical thing (when we don't talk of multiple hours 🙂 ).

[Hypfer]

It will not execute timers unless the latest time sync was successful.