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If these devices don't clean my home, take out the trash, mow the lawn or clean my dog's poo then they're quite useless to me. Why pay for having Amazon or Google bugs in your home?



It's more like having an interface to the voice controls of your phone without your phone being nearby and unlocked. We use it to control lights and media, and we ask it the weather. Nothing works reliably. The Uber integration is clunky and now gives us a generic error.


if you have hardwood floors and not a messy house I would strongly recommend a robot vacuum. I leave that thing on few times a week when leaving the house and every time it manages to collect a handful of dust, mostly speck from cloth


We were thinking of getting a Roomba, since we have a dust bunny problem as well. Seems the only useful home automation so far. But even that one sends a map of your home to the manufacturer which can then sell the data to real estate agencies?


Roombas are garbage, in my experience. Look into the Xiaomi Robot Vacuum, it's about $300 and quite fantastic. Yes it builds a map of your home, but if you dont need phone control then it doesn't need wifi. Unlike a Roomba, it knows where its been and a good idea on what its doing.

This thing is too convinient and I know some us data broker will have a tough time getting the data to do anything with it


isnt map (blueprint) of your house already a public domain that was submitted for approval before construction/renovation?


That probably depends on the locality and age of the house. My house it 118 years old. The city's diagram shows a rectangle for the house and two smaller ones for the front and back porches. They also have no difference between the first and second floors.


I was about to do this and then heard about the paperclip disasters that have ruined floors. Do you hVe a way to mitigate that or have nee vacuums gotten better at detecting that they have something stuck in them?


Im have the $200 one from amazon. it has no cameras or wifi, it just randomly roams around the rooms or you can set it to 'curb' mode and it will be sweeping along the walls. I don't use a lot of paperclips so I would not know but you can test it by feeding it a bunch of paperclips and if it does go on to scratch floors then just return it, I guess.


Paperclips was a generalization. It could happen with any metal object left on the ground.

> if it does go on to scratch floors then just return it, I guess

It would be great if it were that simple, but scratching the floors would cost $1,500+ of damage and force me to leave my house for at least two days.

Either the robot has to be smart enough to avoid dragging objects around with it, or I can't use it. That's why I asked if maybe yours was a newer model that was smart about it.




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