It was great, while it worked.

I’d seen friends have fun with their early Roombas, spending ages fettling them and keeping them running. I decided to leave robot vacuum cleaners until they got a bit smarter.

In April I took the plunge and bought a Neato Robotics D650. It seemed the best reviewed of the mid range ones (I paid £439.99 for it, though they are currently > £500, the prices seem very volatile).

It is smarter that the earlier robots (and also smarter than some of ones still on the market). It doesn’t just do a random walk and it does always know where it is and what shape the room is.

It uses a spinning laser to map the room, along with bumper sensors and drop sensors. It cleans very effectively, making deliberate parallel runs, dividing the room up into chunks, deftly navigating around things without bumping into them etc

It is great at picking dirt up, I can vacuum manually, then send it round the same room and it will still come back with plenty of new dust/fluff/grit in the bin. It has a side brush that is reasonably good at getting stuff out of wall/floor edges and its D shaped body makes it more effective when vacuuming along a straight edge (and it will run straight along the edge, as it knows where it is going).

It cleaning wasn’t perfect of course, it could never get right into a 90 degree corner.

Fettling wasn’t too bad, it was quick and easy to remove the brush and clean it.

The app is ok, it shows you a nice map of the room when it has finished cleaning. You can schedule stuff etc

Watching it navigate back to the charger from a couple of rooms away through various obstacles was very pleasing. I got a second charging unit for upstairs, cleaning the house was kind of fun.

It was great and I loved it.

Until about a month ago, when it started playing up. It started showing the “I’m stuck, pick me up and move me message”. Which normally means it has run over something that has tangled, or it has started pushing something around the room which has upset its inertial location stuff (as the wheels would have slipped, confusing it as to where it is).

In this case there was no obvious problem. Pressing start again fixed it.

Then it kept doing it. But pressing start again would just make it reverse to the left through 30 degrees and then stop again.

Restarting it would some times fix it. Until it wouldn’t.

The forums suggest maybe dodgy bumpy switch or the circuit that senses it. Some people suggest replacing the switch fixes it, others say it does not.

When I bought it, I was aware that support/parts in the the UK wasn’t great. And also, the design doesn’t lend itself to DIY fixing as well as the Roombas. But I hoped it wouldn’t break.

So, it was great, now it is useless. I need to get onto Neato support and then if that fails Amazon.

I have a 1956 Kirby and a teenage daughter. They're voice controlled.

Also...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y31__uv05KI

LOL




We have an older model Neeto, which we got precisely because it doesn't do a random walk, and uses the laser scanner to map the room. We hardly ever use it because of the following design problems:

- It gets stuck and confused among the forest of chair legs in the dining room, breakfast nook, and kitchen bar. Meaning, that, in order to run it, those surfaces have to be cleaned off and the chairs flipped up onto them, like we were a restaurant or something.

- It gets stuck on certain kinds of clutter such as the straps to a backpack or the strings from the venetian blinds on the french doors that go to our back porch (the strings reach the floor when the blinds are fully open).

- The "conning tower" scanner assembly atop the robot is exactly the correct height to get the robot stuck beneath certain pieces of furniture. The scanner allows it to attempt to travel under the furniture, but then it bumps its "head" and gets jammed there, like a truck under the 11'8" bridge.

Have any robot vacuums solved those problems yet?

Luckily for us we only had a single bit of furniture that confused ours, a stool. It was easy enough to just move that when cleaning.

Someone else with a Kirby! Mine is vintage mid-70's. The thing is built like a tank, and weighs like one, too.

But have you seen the operating and maintenance costs???

To be fair, those are things that will trip up a traditional human/vacuum combo. I hate having to move each chair out, vacuum, back in, repeat. It's a pain. I kind of wish you could tell the robot vacuums to just skip an area.

I had an old school Roomba and also a Scooba. I freaking LOVED the Scooba, but it was such a PITA to clean. I felt like I spent more time/effort cleaning that thing than I would have mopping the floor. But I find it interesting that there aren't any mopping robots like it these days. There are plenty that will wipe the floor with a wet rag or swiffer pad, but it's not the same thing as always using clean water/soap to wash the floor.

The main reason I gave up on both devices, though, was battery problems. I was constantly having trouble with battery life. Maybe they've fixed that now, but I'm not willing to spend the exorbitant prices of these things and get burned again.

You can tell the Neato to avoid areas, you can draw out shapes in the app on the map it generates.

Me too, at least for the early Roombas. They'd work great at first, but then the battery would be useless after a surprisingly short time.

Honestly though, I'd be happy to have to replace the battery pack once in a while if it could just not get stuck on clutter.






Indeed, you can tell the robots to avoid certain areas. Even the old random-walk roombas at least had a little infrared transmitter thingy you could put down which kept the roomba out of a given area. My older model Neeto is too old to have a fancy app, but at least it came with a roll of magnetic strip material that you could lay down that it would sense and avoid.

My issue with the "skip an area" thing is twofold:

1. My problem is my housemates leaving tangly shit on the floor, and they do that randomly, and everywhere.

2. It's a workaround to a basic design flaw which defeats the entire purpose of having a robot do the work in the first place. I was promised Rosie from The Jetsons, and I think I should be able to get at least a little closer to that.

Back to the topic at hand:





The problem description certainly sounds like a dodgy sensor of some kind. I once had a car CD player which would keep ejecting the CD every time you inserted one, because it had terrible leaf spring switches to sense when the various parts of the transport mechanism had done their jobs. I would have to dismantle the player and clean the leaf spring contacts. It would work great for a few months and then get dodgy again. This sounds like the exact same problem to me.

Leaf springs {Top Gear}

LOL

Aw, it was before they introduced The Stig with the "Some Say..." intro.

I'm contemplating putting together a Stig costume for the next SF convention I attend, once we're all vaccinated and they can do them again. In the US, that's just obscure enough to be interesting and different. The beauty of it is that I would be *in character* to ignore everything and everyone, and just stand motionless for long periods of time. Easiest costume for socially awkward people.

To be fair, Hammond kept saying "leaf springs". The corvette only has a single transverse leaf spring.

Like a Model T.

Or many horse drawn carriages.

Did some debugging on it today, in readiness for contacting support.

Predictably it wouldn't fault to start with, but I managed to get it to fault in the same way, once I'd run it for an hour or so.

Same failure:

- "help I'm stuck"
- check it, nothing blocking/tangled
- start it
- it backs up, turning left
- stops after a couple of seconds and says "help I'm stuck"

Checked/cleaned:

- laser
- drop sensors
- wall sensor

Tried to start it a few more times, same issue.

I don't think it can be the bumper switches themselves. If you press either of them in and try and start it, it knows they are pressed and refuses to start at all.

I power cycled it and then it would start and run normally. However I know from when it was faulting before that this doesn't always fix it, sometimes you can power cycle it and it still won't start.