One thing I am skeptical of is robot vacuums that connect to the internet. Some of the higher end Roombas do that and I'm skeptical that it makes them more efficient. Wrote some more about it here:
https://productdork.com/t/whats-the-best-robot-vacuum-cleane...
The good news is that the Eufy's seem to work fine without any internet connectivity. I've got the Eufy RoboVac 11S and would highly recommend it. Unlike my previous Roomba, it doesn't speed up before bumping into things—it mostly avoids it. Also, it is significantly quieter.
The big complaint I always hear is "yeah but the pattern is random, it doesn't clean the whole floor evenly"
That is technically true, but the roomba cleans the floor for an hour, randomly, every day. This is a tremendous amount of cleaning. It pulls probably a pound of dirt off the floor every week, maybe more. Being able to have the floor cleaned - even randomly - for an hour, every day, makes a tremendous difference.
It might not get the spilled cat food for 2-3 days, but on day 4 it will get it. If you're only vacuuming once a week that is probably faster than a human would do it. It also vacuums all the weird spots, like under the sink in the bathroom, that you forget to check every week.
It also trains you to not leave stray socks, cell phone charging cables etc on the floor. Which is nice if you're not super super tidy.
One thing that can help a lot is gps (or other absolute position). This can definitely help make sure your robot can make roughly the correct turn to get in those nooks.
It’s the perfect thing for there because the last thing you want to do after a relaxing weekend at the lake is vacuum. Just hit go before leaving and you’re set.
Now I’m curious about the lawn ones. Anyone have any experience to share?
I worked extensively on small robotic vehicles in the 80's and 90's. My undergrad thesis was on a robotic simulator.
Ob. cat tax: https://imgur.com/a/JHBue4Y
More importantly, her legs and back aren't doing so well these days and it's eliminated a painful and difficult daily task for her. She loves it almost as much as a pet. Just set it up and forget it for the next hour and the floor is mopped! The biggest problem it has is getting hung-up on her grandkids toys.
See existing models here: https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/models/index.cgi
You can share your results as HTML if that's your thing.
It was an interesting exercise, and if our pet-load was a little lighter (I'd hate to see it get caught in Macaw Poop) I'd consider doing it again.
But.
They do wear and there was maintenance, and the batteries did lose capacity, and I eventually wandered away from them because there was a lot of labor in a labor saving device.
Maybe a mop for the trailer?
Also, I also had very little expectations in the beginning (just a bit less dust) but it did really amazing job.
I seriously don't know how we kept our sanity before having one of these. We really notice it if we don't run it some days.
The Neato ones are a bit more methodical - they have a simple time-of-flight rotating laser sensor that does some SLAM-style stuff to map out the room which means it can do long continuous back-and-forth paths across the room (random image I found that explains it nicely: https://www.generationrobots.com/img/cms/Navigation-Algorith...) It has a charging base thing - it has a special pattern of stripes (kinda like a barcode I guess) behind a human-opaque panel that it uses to locate the charger.
While it was nice to just set the thing off and leave it to do its thing, it is not without problems though:
- it would very happily suck-up and chew cables or errant socks etc, and/or push low stuff around in front of it (e.g shoes). You had to spend time picking up phone charging cables and shoes etc before starting.
- it was not very accurate when it came to working around slanted chair/table legs (since its laser beam would only pick a point approx 5cm off of the ground, it would often hit the lower part of the leg that was in its path but that it could not see)
- it would often get stuck "under" things since there was about 1.5cm of extra height above the laser, and it feels like a lot of IKEA furniture is all just high enough for it to drive under and get wedged because it could not see it.
- it would sometimes get stuck in situations where there was a very tight space between two things (e.g. dining chair and a wall)but where in theory it was wide enough for it to drive down - it would end up trying to reverse out, but actually managing to reverse into the wall and jack its self up so the wheels lost traction.
- it does not know if it has "missed" something or done a good job, so often stubborn bits of fluff don't get picked up.
We've now had to retire ours because we got new carpets and it seems to get stuck a lot on the new carpet that is a bit thicker, often doing wheel spins for 30 seconds at a time. This seems to really confuse the SLAM algo since after it regains traction it ends up just driving straight into walls and stuff, despite having a laser sensor to tell it there was a wall there ... I guess it used some sort of encoding from its wheels as input too (perhaps as a effort to ignore "unexpected" laser returns - e.g. perhaps intended to ignore people pets when it has already mapped a room?)
We've replaced it with a dyson cordless stick vacuum thing with a wall-charger-dock thing. It doesn't take that much longer to do it by hand when you factor in the prep-time (picking up cables, moving dining chairs away from the table, moving things far away out from the wall etc etc), rescuing stuck robot time, or manual pick-ups of things it missed required afterwards, and then moving all of your chairs etc back into position. It is also nice to not have to bend down so much to move the robot one around, or empty its dustbin.
Claiming ownership over women is not a funny joke, and completely lost my respect.
1. have or retain possession of.
2. continue or cause to continue in a specified condition, position, course, etc.
Could mean keep her as a girlfriend, If I say "I'm keeping my doctor" I'm not claiming to personally take ownership of my GP.
We learn it’s „impulsive“ for her to make spending decisions (for him it would have been „decisive“, probably, given the good opportunity and how quick he is to think on his feet). He even moans about being „incapable of being upset“, as if it would be entirely normal, nay expected, to be upset about one‘s spouse making a sub-$200 spending decision.
Then he decides to „keep her“, as if it’s entirely his choice.
Yes, sure, somewhat outdated role models by themselves are somewhat benign, and probably too widespread to really get upset about. But this just stood out for me, somehow. Try reading it with reversed roles if you did not notice.
It turned out that all deficiencies of such a vacuum are offset by its basic function: it keeps the apartment clean each day, every day. Dirty corners? Weak suction? Small container? Somewhat noisy? Not too smart? Gets stuck sometimes? I need to clean hairs out of the rotating brush? I still have to mop the place? Pffft, none of this matters when the carpet and the kitchen are dust-free every day without me doing the vacuuming. If it misses a spot today, it will get it tomorrow. After a few runs the floor is indeed cleaner than it ever was, and stays that way. No rogue crumbs stuck to my feet before the cleanup day. Still managed to find something unpleasant on the floor? Just give the robot a bit of work right here. It's like SSDs after HDDs: you have to worry about having backups, but it'll be amazing in the meantime.
Rather prophetically, the cheap production has shown itself when something got cooked in the electronic insides and the vac entered the eternity of ‘error 03’.
One of the complaints about the smarter robot vacuums (like ones that map the house) is that they consistently miss the same spots every time. I think the dumb "bounce off the walls randomly" algorithm is actually the best one for this kind of product.
I felt like writing a automobile recall notice that says “inappropriate X leading to Y after Z repeats” of which X seems pretty benign item like a wire sheath was just one step too thin or a strap was too tight by a notch.
Damn those things are consistent and it’s extraordinary how powerful consistency is...
But I usually don't vacuum, so overall I'm satisfied with my roborock.
Might be an application for more advanced computer vision in vacuums—to figure out which things are not to be sucked up. Though it smells of generic AI.
We used to have a roomba, first edition, before kids, but it got broken after a year, the first kid came and we have not been clean since.
Post-kids, it takes 10 minutes to tidy the floor and 5 to vacuum it myself (and I do a better job), so it's not as much use.
EDIT: here are some examples by other people: https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/lon...
And here are some resources if you have a Xiaomi robot vacuum cleaner (also sold as RoboRock) https://github.com/dgiese/dustcloud
In order to get the progression of the run, you could have an RGB LED sweeping through a color scale during the run.
Fortunately I bought the item from Amazon. I issued a dispute and within minutes they created a return label and issued a refund.
I now have a Roomba. I'm pretty happy so far.
It runs Ubuntu, you can root it. And even get spotify running on it.
https://github.com/dgiese/dustcloud
https://medium.com/@anxodio/how-to-get-spotify-working-on-yo...
Some might ask why you'd want Spotify on your vacuum? I would have it play Dolly Parton's "(Working) 9 to 5" on loop whenever it's running. I feel like that would be hilarious forever. Other suggestions welcome.
Most Xiaomi smart-devices speak a protocol called miIO. There are several libraries/bindings for your favorite languages/tools as well as a nice CLI tool[0].
The only tricky part is getting the device token[1]. But once you have that it's smooth sailing.
[0] https://python-miio.readthedocs.io/en/latest/vacuum.html [1] https://python-miio.readthedocs.io/en/latest/discovery.html#...
One key insight for visualizing "hitting a wall and then turning" is that you can pretend that the walls in your room are covered with mirrors that you can walk through. Hitting the wall and bouncing at an angle is equivalent to approaching the mirror at your angle, and then continuing straight through it into the mirrored side. You can verify this in your bathroom mirror by bouncing your finger off it, vs. pretending it goes straight through: in both cases, which side of the bathroom does it bounce toward?
After a finite distance of continuing straight through mirror-walls, do you end up in your original location? I.e. can you see the back of your head in the room of mirrors? If so, then you're on a periodic path, and you're not going to cover the entire floor.
Returned it. Doing a 15 minute vacuum every Saturday morning is easier for me than to deal with all this, and it keeps the house tidy during the week.
What? I'm not even in the US, but DDG'ing the "Eufy RoboVac 30" brings me straight to the manufacturer's website, where it's even $40 cheaper. Why give "Lord Bezos" a piece of the cake, when he doesn't even need to have one?
Maybe it wasn't so at the time of writing, but I have a weird feeling it's en vogue to claim to be against Amazon, but to then find some half-assed reason as to why they're still the "only sensible" choice, and so it's all good. WTF? Are these Amazon-financed articles?
All that said, I really really want one!
15 years ago, I had one of the first robot lawnmovers (Husqvarna) and did exactly the same thing: Watched it for hours, observing how it worked.
Back then, it seems it was programmed with instructions:
- Go! If you hit an edge, rotate in a random direction and ... Go! - If crossing the base-wire (a buried wire leading to the base station) while battery level < 40%, follow it and charge.
Another one is watching 3D printer’s. There’s something soothing with just starting at the print head while the plastic oozes out and creates something tangible. It’s Star Trek’s replicator v0.00001. After a while, you realise you’ve been staring at it for 45 minutes.
I won't spoil what happens with them :) But the interesting thing happens at about 1:10 into the video.
I'm confused how Amazon is relevant here. This product is available from many online retailers under $200.
If you want to quit Amazon... then maybe try even a little?
- It has infrared proximity sensors spread around the bumper which allow it to slow down before hitting a wall or other large flat surface, avoid it entirely (for example to turn around and shoot off in another direction), or do quite precise edge cleaning without relying on the bumper. This works best on walls or skirting boards.
- The base station has an infrared beacon which the robot uses to find id. Furthermore, the robot can judge whether it is on or off-axis relative to the base station (i.e. whether it is lined up straight or not). The robot doesn't just dive in from any angle: it tries to line up first.
- It has some level of stall detection for its motors: if the brushes or wheels get stuck on something, it will stop. The internet-connected versions of these vacuums will send out a notification when this happens.
I have a Shark IQ which some videos rate as the best in the middle class. We have 1200sqft to cover and it can do about half that on a charge, methodically.
But it often gets stuck behind the AV center, or behind the piano, or wedged under my wife's chair or a certain cabinet baseboard in the bathroom. At least once a week. And with nobody home, the voice alert calling for help is pointless (scheduled to run when nobody is home).
So it just runs its batteries down waiting. If it could do one more thing better, I would say go into low-power when stuck?
Anyway we like it, gave it a name ("Puck") and each day check if Puck 'made it home'. If not its a pleasant job walking around to find where Puck got stuck. Not a bad purchase at all, considering the always-clean floors(!) and the entertainment value to boot.
You have to into the account the respective strengths and weaknesses of humans and robots.
I can easily best a robot at sensing the layout of my living room, but a robot can easily best me at perseverance.
I mainly got it because my wife and I have a dust-mite allergy and cleaning the floor with water or HEPA vacuum can help. We've replaced it with a much more expensive (and totally manual) hizero[1] wet vacuum, and it's great. Also, we have tile floors so wet always cleans better than a vacuum (and wet pads need to be cleaned/replaced way too often on a robo-vacuum).
My vacuum (Robzone) collects it in plastic box that is to be opened and cleaned out into trashbin with attached brush, the dust inevitably gets airborne.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003M2F7NI/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_z5...
This also cleans the filter really well, letting it last over a year.
There is also paper hepa filter on it that can't get wet. Even so, not sure if mucking with dirty water is worth it.
As a professional cleaner I have the following suggestion:
Make A cleaning schedule with different frequencies for different tasks. For humans you have to limit complexity, the robot cant get enough of it.
The trick is to do a great job with the least runtime and perfect timing.
1 (Highest frequency): The visible areas when walking from the front door to the seat where your guests will sit. The entire house can be either 1) a complete mess, it will still look clean. Or 2) the entire house can be supper clean it still wont look clean.
Some cameras would be nifty here.
1.1: edges for 1
2: Same as 1 for all frequently used paths in the house except those covered by 1. Could split this up into levels of frequency.
2.1: edges for 2
3rd: All open surfaces not covered by 1 and 2.
3.1: all edges not covered by 1.1 and 2.1
The edges are done roughly every 4th round.
The 1st it can do multiple times per day depending on traffic. (1 times is a good minimum) It could by a dynamic number based on motion sensors. Timing is everything, if the room is empty it can do its thing for 2-3 minutes (quit if someone walks in) Nr 2 is done half to 1/3 as frequent as 1. Nr 3 is done half to 1/3 as frequent as 2.
I've used the above system for years and it continues to amaze me how quick one can execute the routine and how clean everything looks. Nr 1 sometimes takes no more than a gaze around the room.
Without such system one just does "everything" every time which is a lot more work than it seems. (enough work to cut the same corners every time) The result also looks really inferior.
As usual, a bunch of ripoff Chinese competitors will sell you a cheaper piece of shit that you'll find yourself throwing away in three years. Resist the temptation.
At one point the tread wore out on the wheels, so it was struggling to get over the threshold into different rooms. Rather than buy a whole new set of wheels, I found a blog saying that Kirby 301291 vacuum cleaner belts just happen to perfectly fit on roomba wheels and work as replacement treads. Now it's been happily rolling around on vacuum belts for the past year or more.
It is also a joy to maintain and was obviously designed by people who care about maintenance being reasonable.
It got stuck occasionally and needed to be rescued but once you knew what it got stuck on you could clean up, as you would with normal vacuuming, and it would be mostly fine.
The newer robot vacuums have a lot more tech but don't seem to have improved upon the basic functionality much. They still get stuck a lot, have trouble with deep pile carpet, and don't get everything.
I honestly have no idea how Roomba is still in business
- Will I have to register an account? Will I have to take time unsubscribing from the email lists they sign me up for?
- Will the checkout form work? Will it be secure? Will it be a single page, or will there be separate pages of shipping info, billing info, payment method, confirmation of sale, and receipt?
- Will any of those pages be broken, forcing me to start over?
- When will it show up? I'm not even so impatient that I need the "two day thing" (I usually pick a later date for a $1 Amazon digital credit anyway), but, when? There are nearly never estimates, and about half the remaining MIGHT send a tracking number later.
Other things crop up, but basically there's countless little things that can go wrong and you if you pick Amazon they _all_ go away.
Registering an account would shoo me away too, but with PayPal and a study that showed this'll scare 75% of potential customers away, that mostly seems to be a thing of the past. Subscription lists in the EU have been greatly reduced by GDPR. Some still offend this, granted, but they are occuring less and less.
> "Will the checkout form work? Will it be secure? Will it be a single page, or will there be separate pages of shipping info, billing info, payment method, confirmation of sale, and receipt?"
The bureaucratic things you mention are governed by law here in Germany, so I needn't bother with that, for their (prolonged) existence presumes compliance. The technical security details are legit concerns in my opinion, too. OTOH, sticking to one merchant brings with it the risks of mono-cultures.
> "Will any of those pages be broken, forcing me to start over?"
Come on.
> "When will it show up? I'm not even so impatient that I need the "two day thing" (I usually pick a later date for a $1 Amazon digital credit anyway), but, when? There are nearly never estimates, and about half the remaining MIGHT send a tracking number later."
I usually can plan such purchases in advance, that a delay of even a week doesn't bother me. Parcel delivery services in Germany rarely require more than 5 working days for national shipments.
> "Other things crop up, but basically there's countless little things that can go wrong and you if you pick Amazon they _all_ go away. "
For this, I appear to have eBay. I feel they grant more autonomy to the merchant, which I believe to be actually better for the customer in the long-run. Amazon feels closer to the customer, but such a customer strategy runs the risk of a bait-and-switch to the disadvantage of the customer, once their monopoly solidifies.
In addition, checking the Internet Archive shows that the manufacturer had it listed for $269.99 in September 2019, two months after the post was written.
Honestly, that just trips my too-good-to-be-true alarm bells. The times I'd need Amazon I can usually find a similarly priced competitor, where buying is more of a breeze and bliss than Amazon, having to work through the special conditions of coupons, terms, etc.
There was only one case in my experience, in 2013 or -14, where Amazon was the "only choice", when I "want-needed" a cheap China-made USB microscope, and Amazon had it, but not a single merchant on eBay. The device was quite fresh on the market, and about half a year later was also available on eBay. I waited.
I mean...duh? Have you been living under a rock? Amazon affiliate has been a great passive income strategy for over a decade.
It's muddy, because AFAIK, anyone can write on Medium, so it's not immediately recognizable as marketing, correct? Which, I presume, is also part of the strategy.
It's a legit strategy, it's just that one needs to keep in mind to second-guess everything the author says, since it could be a paid ad. Something, something along the lines of commercial and independent reviewers. I guess it's a never-ending war that must be fought.
Sure, I wish I could claim otherwise, but in my experience, it's almost never worth going for one-stop buys :/
1) It runs around our flat which I think we could vacuum well in about 15-20 minutes, perhaps similar to yours in size.
2) The vacuum happily bumbles around under our table and chairs and it seems to do a pretty good job. If we want it to clean where the chairlegs are, we just move the chairs against the wall the night before and move them back the following evening when we get back from work.
3) I feel like this is a cheap shot: it doesn't clean bathtubs or toilet bowls either (and like windowsills, it doesn't advertise to clean those, either).
4) No. It may be round, but it has two rotating brushes placed towards the front which get dust and crumbs out of corners, but the brush/vacuum portion itself does not reach right to the edges of the machine, so you're unlikely to get deep cleaning on the edges of carpets.
Overall I'm very impressed with it: it consistently comes back with a lot of dust and crumbs in its bin (we run it Mon, Wed, Fri), replacement parts (e.g. brushes) are cheap from the usual suspects in China, the edge cleaning is more intelligent than discussed by the linked article, and the floor under our sofa (a heavy 3-seater) has never been so consistently dust-free.
I've found that while it doesn't do a lot of what a human would, it can do it daily. In my case the time savings made it pay for itself in half a year.
My home has pretty high thresholds/doorsteps (what are they even called?), and the robot always gets stuck. Thus, we clean together once a week: it does the vacuuming, and I clean the bathroom, kitchen etc and help it go where it wants.
This kinda works, but I wonder if there are models specifically with higher clearing for getting over bigger obstacles?
I don't dare keep it on a schedule nowadays, because I have kids who leave stuff on the floor everywhere, including charging cables for phones that can get tangled up in the roomba. What I usually do is a quick check under the couch and tv bench, then start it manually when I leave for work.
The only thing I hate is that it gets stuff trapped in there so easily. It is meant to have some sort of anti-cord-catching technology, but unless I am very careful I will find it eating a charger or a cat toy or something. It also takes longer than my handheld vacuum, but I don't mind that - often I just quickly pick things up before I run out to the store and let it run as I leave, and then come home to a vacuumed apartment.
My cats also prefer the Roomba even though the noise is comparable. They hide from the Dyson, but couldn't give a crap about the robot running around.
We've the exact same model as the article, bought on a sale last year for ~£180, and have been incredibly satisfied. The difference between a once a week/fortnight deeper clean and having it run over every day (before we get up!) has been incredibly obvious. It has also added an... incentive to avoid floor clutter.
But overall I found we end up vacuuming the flat a lot more now that we have the roborok than before, so that's a big plus for me.
My wife spent half the money we spent on the roborok on a cordless samsung manual vacuum cleaner that broke in a year; I'm convinced I've seen the light now and that robot vacuuming is the future.
4; There is a side brush (maybe even two) on most models. For the exact reason you mention.
More than once I found it under my bed, a sock half swallowed in its intake.
Poor little guy didn't survive the container voyage from Australia to the UK.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/eufy-RoboVac-Replacement-Compatible-A...
You just countered my list with a list of "this usually doesn't happen" responses. But sometimes they do, and it adds up. And don't get me started on eBay, where about 15% of stuff I've bought has gotten lost somewhere in the void.
Even if thats the case, I would rather have an item get lost and wait for it to get reshipped than my experience with Amazon mailing me the wrong product and then waiting to mail it back, get a refund, and then order the right product.
When I'm on a site who's checkout doesn't complete, I spent a minute looking for another seller and buy it from them. I would rather use a minute looking somewhere else then waiting a few days because I have to return the wrong product to Amazon.
There's no denying that Amazon is known for being not great to workers, especially warehouse staff who are hired as contractors. But long before Amazon existed I did temp factory and warehouse work for a couple of summers. I promise you that also varied from miserable to criminal. I have no reason to think a random vendor is better than Amazon here.
Reasonable people could differ, but my current thinking is I'm better off pressuring Amazon, who at least has a brand they care about, than to swap to whatever anonymous company is doing US fulfillment for a random Chinese manufacturer.
Maybe I should go Thoreau and live in a cabin, but until then I'm very busy. I do a lot of other things to adapt my life to try and improve the general world, but ecommerce habits just isn't making the cut yet.
Thus the counter-argument, for me at least, stands out, which is less volatility from a decentralized market, however, if a centralized market would turn out to have better employee conditions, then this reduced volatility would in turn work against other companies as an argument, and so we're back at square one.
History tells us that monopolies tend to ...treat their employees badly? I don't know and I think it depends on the company and market it serves, but my gut-feeling says yes and so, to me, less volatility sounds like the sanest gut-decision I can make.
It's up to each and everyone for themselves to decide, I guess.
