How to set the internal schedule on a Roomba 960 using rest980

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For some reason my Roomba 960 decided to fall off the cloud, or at least the official app refuses to see it.

I thankfully already have an instance of rest980 running in my homelab anyhow, and it is still happily chatting with the bot. And tbh, I might just block cloud access again as having everything local is better anyhow.

In any case, I wanted to disable the schedule currently set on it internally to switch to scheduling stuff from my home automation, but without the app working I wasn’t sure on how. So I went hunting through rest980’s source - as the README didn’t tell me what I was looking for - and found that I could program the weekly schedule with some easy curl magic via the /api/local/config/week endpoint.

Firing off a GET against that, this is the data structure I received:

{
  "cycle": [
    "none",
    "start",
    "start",
    "start",
    "start",
    "start",
    "none"
  ],
  "h": [
    9,
    15,
    15,
    15,
    15,
    15,
    9
  ],
  "m": [
    0,
    0,
    0,
    0,
    0,
    0,
    0
  ]
}

cycle seems to be the on/off button from Sunday at index 0 to Saturday on index 6. start schedules a cleaning run, none disables it. h is the hours on which to start each day, and m the minute.

What I wanted to do was to set all of the days to off, and this I achieved with this combined GET/POST call with some jq manipulation in the middle:

curl $REST980_URL/api/local/config/week | \
    jq '.cycle[] = "none"' | \
    curl --json @- $REST980_URL/api/local/config/week

Another problem - hopefully - solved! I’ll see tomorrow if this really disabled the schedule 😅 but I’m optimistic!

How to use jq to extract new posts from a JSON Feed

Thu, 02 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’m currently looking into ways to automate some stuff around new posts on this page (be it blog or TIL post) directly during the page build on GitHub Actions. For this, I first need to be able to reliably detect new posts, from a bash run step. So here’s how to do that with jq.

The idea is to get the current feed.json prior to publishing the page, and then compare it to the one that was just generated during the build. If there are any differences, we know that there are new posts and can trigger further actions from there.

# Get current feed.json
curl -s https://foosel.net/til/feed.json > feed.current.json

# Get new feed.json
cp public/til/feed.json feed.next.json

# Compare the two, this is where the magic happens
jq --slurpfile current til.current.json --slurpfile next til.next.json -n '$next[0].items - $current[0].items' > til.json

Let’s go through this jq command there:

--slurpfile reads in the given files and makes it accessible as an array contained in the given variable. In this case we read in til.current.json and make it accessible as $current, and also read in til.next.json and make it accessible as $next.
-n doesn’t wait for input on stdin.
'$next[0].items - $current[0].items' subtracts the items from the new feed from the items in the current feed¹.
> til.json writes the output to til.json.

til.json will then contain all new items (as long as there weren’t more than the feed’s item size), can be uploaded as an artifact and then used in further jobs².

The indexing (e.g. $new[0]) here is needed due to --slurpfile creating an array from the read file. I admittedly need to experiment more with this option to fully understand it, but for the purpose here it works. ↩︎
My current goal is to move my announcements on Mastodon for new posts from my NodeRED install got the page build, and also send any webmentions for links contained in new posts as well. ↩︎

jq on foosel.net

How to set the internal schedule on a Roomba 960 using rest980

How to use jq to extract new posts from a JSON Feed