A SmartThings community developer who goes by Stoeckie published an Edge driver on 30 October 2026 that lets a SmartThings hub control iRobot Roomba vacuums directly on the local network. The hub talks to the robot over the robot's own MQTT broker, with TLS on port 8883. There is no cloud service, no IFTTT and no extra computer in between. The code is on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 licence and is not affiliated with iRobot or Samsung.
What the driver does
The Roomba shows up in SmartThings as a robot cleaner with its state: cleaning, paused, returning home, charging, idle, or an alarm when it is stuck or reports an error. From there it can be started, paused, stopped or sent back to the dock. A switch is mapped as well, where on starts or resumes a job and off sends the robot home. Battery level is reported, and robots with a Clean Base get an "Empty bin" button.
The robot pushes every change, so routines can react straight away, for example with a notification when the robot starts charging or gets stuck.
Later on 30 October the driver gained a Favorites list, so room cleaning set up in the iRobot app can be started from SmartThings. The driver learns each favorite the first time it runs from the iRobot app. The developer's optional Stoeckie Bridge (Windows or Docker) can fetch the names from an iRobot account, but it uses an unofficial login, and iRobot limits logins per account. On 1 November a Connection status was added, because SmartThings has no routine trigger for a device going offline. It flips to Offline after two minutes without a connection.
Which Roombas work
The driver targets Wi-Fi Roombas that run the local broker: the 600 and 900 series with Wi-Fi, i3, i7, i8, s9, j7 and similar models. It was tested on an s9+ with firmware 22.29.10. Room favorites need a robot with Smart Maps, so a 600 series gets only start, pause, dock and status.
The 2025 models, including the Roomba 105, 205, 405 and 505, refuse local connections. The Combo 10 Max, Plus 500 Combo and Max 700 support Matter instead and can be added to SmartThings as Matter devices without this driver.
Setup and limits
After enrolling the hub in the developer's driver channel and scanning for nearby devices, the robot goes on its dock and the HOME button is held for two seconds until it plays tones. The robot then hands its password to the hub, which stores it locally. A DHCP reservation for the robot is recommended. The driver turns off TLS certificate checks, because the robot uses a self-signed certificate.
The main catch is that a Roomba accepts one local connection at a time. Anyone already running the Roomba integration in Home Assistant has to disconnect it first. One user in the thread suggested keeping Home Assistant as the only local client and passing the robot to SmartThings through a Matter bridge add-on instead.
The timing fits a wider shift. SmartThings starts charging for direct cloud API access on 4 November, while Edge drivers that run on the hub stay free. A local driver also keeps working when iRobot's cloud does not.