Roombas
Buyer beware: there's a refurb of the newer Roomba model 530 on Woot today for $140: http://www.woot.com
I hope these are better than the older Discovery series. I have several of the older Roombas and I have never been all that impressed. They do a mediocre cleaning job on carpet; they can never find the charger; and the batteries die every other month. The battery issue is agonizing: it's a sealed pack of NiMH cells. Invariably, one single cell goes bad and the pack is useless unless you hack it apart to replace one or all of the cells.
The wife loves them when they work, which is too infrequently IMHO. I have a pile of them (including friends' cast-offs) and it's quite a chore to fix or frankenstein them together. And I LOVE robots! God bless the average consumers & early adopters who may be less conversant in maintaining these li'l PITAs.
That said, hat's off to iRobot for being one of the few success stories in consumer robotics. I met & presented to cofounders Colin Angle and Helen Greiner back in 2004, they are young & sharp. Helen left iRobot and is off quietly doing her own thing now at Cyphyworks.com . Saw one update at http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/irobot-cofounders-new-uav
I hope these are better than the older Discovery series. I have several of the older Roombas and I have never been all that impressed. They do a mediocre cleaning job on carpet; they can never find the charger; and the batteries die every other month. The battery issue is agonizing: it's a sealed pack of NiMH cells. Invariably, one single cell goes bad and the pack is useless unless you hack it apart to replace one or all of the cells.
The wife loves them when they work, which is too infrequently IMHO. I have a pile of them (including friends' cast-offs) and it's quite a chore to fix or frankenstein them together. And I LOVE robots! God bless the average consumers & early adopters who may be less conversant in maintaining these li'l PITAs.
That said, hat's off to iRobot for being one of the few success stories in consumer robotics. I met & presented to cofounders Colin Angle and Helen Greiner back in 2004, they are young & sharp. Helen left iRobot and is off quietly doing her own thing now at Cyphyworks.com . Saw one update at http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/irobot-cofounders-new-uav
Comments
I have had them fail to find their base once or twice too, and like you I have found that they only do a mediocre job at best. I have cats so that makes it harder for them with all the fur.
I did just learn that if you pop the top panel off there is a serial port and iRoot published all the codes to interface with it. You can even program it to play different songs.
I LOVE them . and work so well for me for keeping a clean room. . they wont replace a full vac but to keep a clean room tidy they are good .
I was a bit more impressed with the Roombas. We have three of them, plus a Scooba. I have found that the dust bin fills with more dirt than I would expect and the carpets appear much nicer after the Roomba has run it's course.
We have had the batteries go bad, but we certainly have gotten more than a few months out of them. I think the worst one lasted over a year.
Except for when we first started using the Roombas, they always find their way back to the charging base. In the beginning we had to learn where they would get hung up and change things to prevent that. I am sure that it also helps that the charging base is centrally located so it is not hard for the Roomba to find it.
Rich H