Build123d

My Dreame L50 Ultra (affiliate link) could pick up dog hair, but its dock struggled to get the dense wads of hair out of the robot and into the bag. I made an adapter so an external wet/dry vacuum could do the emptying instead, with Home Assistant handling the switching. The project is finished and in use, and I haven’t had a hairball since!

I directed the project and supplied the measurements and physical fit-test feedback. Codex did the CAD implementation and Home Assistant automation work, and helped draft this post. The printed parts and physical tests were my side of the collaboration.

The replacement bags annoyed me too. Bags like these on Amazon (affiliate link) were about fifty cents to a dollar each. Getting them cheaper on AliExpress is an option, but it still sucks when a hairball gets stuck and the bag is only half full. Throwing away a half-full disposable bag means more waste going to landfill, on top of paying for capacity I wasn’t getting to use. Cheaper bags wouldn’t fix the dock’s inability to get the hair into them.

I also looked at this reusable dust-bin design on MakerWorld. I didn’t think it would be enough for my setup: the bins were small, and replacing the bag with a rigid container wouldn’t address the hairballs clogging the evacuation path. The design also calls for cutting up a vacuum bag and using its filter material in the printed bin, so it still means sacrificing a bag for filtration.