The Chinese $Mi bots I’ve come across lack the suction power I loved about the Neato. I’m in search of a no-nonsense replacement. Any solid suggestions? Dyson one seems nice but way to expensive.
- Software quality is crucial, and new models are often iffy. Badly programmed vacuums (and almost every brand has those) are incredibly annoying, because they get stuck constantly, fall down stairs, leave dirty areas, can’t find the way to the base station, etc. Roborock seems to be one of the few who nails this.
- Suction power should be maximized, or you’ll spend time cleaning up after the robot. The S7 I bought has 5100Pa and I think that’s acceptable, but I still need to do two runs sometimes (which is low effort for me, but it means more noise).
- Since we wanted a vacuum that also mops: Those mops, if not managed well, get moldy and start to stink after just a few days. Build layout and engineering quality are big factors here - ours almost never stinks even though it has no drying fan (some do).
- A base station is needed for real hands-off usage, and those are damn expensive when bought afterwards. And do change the water tanks regularly, they can get quite smelly, fast. It’s the one non-negotiable maintenance we have to do every week.
- I was looking for vacuums with explicit mention of HEPA filters, but it seems the more expensive ones have decent filters without ever mentioning HEPA. I’m still not sure what grade the S7 filters really are, but it seems allergy friendly (likely also owed to the mop and the usage of a filter bag in the base station).
- Even if the manual says to wash the filter, don’t; they will often degrade. Better to use compressed air (carefully) to clean instead.
Overall, we are still happy with the S7 Pro Ultra after a solid year of usage. It’s been a time saver rather than a time sink, and apart from getting stuck sometimes laying around, it has always done a solid job.
Few things:
1. We have HEPA bags - each bag acts as HEPA filter.
2. We found that more than suction power, the brush roll is more import for effective sweeping and vacuuming. It picks the dirt way better… so we have designed first of its kind to hair tangle-free brush roll. It is designed to be effective on all kids of surfaces.
3. We further improve efficacy with actuating cleaning head so it adjust the height for each type of surface with diff thicknesses.
4. The HEPA bags last a month if just vacuuming and about a week if daily vacuuming and mopping. It collects both wet and dry messes. It even has version of diaper salt and charcoal powder so it doesn’t smell or get moldy.
5. But the most important is completely Vision first perception with precision 3D system so that it doesn’t get stuck, chew wires, etc.
Indoor world is entirely built by humans, for humans, to fit our vision first perception system. So we have given it a very similar perception system.
6. Private by design. It was built to work completely w/o internet connection.
Hopefully all of these will be adressed
I think you're going to have a hard time competing against the S8.
I have an S8 and it's a real life quality improvement, I love that thing
I'd hope so, that's kinda the point.
But seriously, my house hold just replaced the Roombas with roborock and couldn't be happier
Matic builds full matterport like 3D map just using CV. This enables Matic to Precisely navigate without bumping at all.
We have built 10x better vSLAM than the best open source lib like Orb SLAM.
AMA.
We tend to measure our accuracy with loop closures and slam graph consistency over time.
Here’s the link of Matic self and exploring and building map on the fly: https://www.dropbox.com/s/e051nmb1ci0o8nu/Auto_Explore_Mehul...
Also, Indoor world is designed with our vision first perception. We think robots need to be imbued with similar system. And we believe vision is enough (there’s a reason why nature chose vision based systems for us?)
Three bottlenecks in on fully autonomous indoor robots are:
1. Perception and Precise SLAM 2. Affordability 3. Privacy.
All three are feasible with Tesla like cameras only approach.
Problem with indoor robots isn’t sensors — it’s lack of brains/algorithms.
Disc robots have been around for 20 years. Most are exactly the same from inside.
It’s designed to clean visible dirt thoroughly.
Frankly, if primary use case is cleaning underneath furniture than disc robots are great already.
* Eufy RoboVac 11 (no lidar, the "stumble around triggering front bumper" locomotion)
* Dreame Z10 Pro (lidar, base station vacuum emptying, mop attachment)
* Dreame L10s Ultra (lidar/camera, base station vacuum emptying plus clean/waste water for integrated mopping)
I root a second a vacuum for my partner's place, but past that it's very hard to recommend a Valetudo setup to someone remote who doesn't have the technical skills to do the rooting and install procedure. So the Matic is potentially appealing to me, even if I never end up using one myself.
Looking at the Matic page: I think this is aimed at people with very cluttered houses, i.e. folks with young kids? The implicit pitch here seems to be, "it doesn't matter how cluttered your house is; this little robot can get in there to clean without tangling".
Except... that's never made explicit? It's just a lot of photos of very cluttered spaces. I'm left to connect the dots.
Customers aren't going to care about "Real-time 3D floor mapping" or "Cutting-edge vision software". They want "Won't trip over your (sometimes literal) shit".
Vacuum feature wise, it seems like table stakes and not much past that? I only just upgraded to the L10s Ultra, which has a larger base station that includes two water containers--one for clean water, and one for waste water. The robot returns to the base station to cycle water and clean the mop pads every X square meters (configurable). This does such a better job actually mopping, compared to the Z10 Pro's mop attachment. It lifts the mop pads when it crosses carpet, so it can even mop the other side of large area rugs that fill rooms. I suspect the Matic's mopping will be only marginally okay, especially with no mechanism to automatically clean the mop pad?
Rubber roller seems to be common on newer robots too.
Having a charger-only base station seems really limiting (versus emptying on-robot waste into a larger bag on the base station itself).
I picked up a second L10s Ultra for my partner's place for $630 during the black friday period, so price-wise it's going to be an uphill battle. Honestly, though, I don't think people willing to pay $1k for a cleaning device are all that price sensitive. I'm trading money for convenience, and I would absolutely trade more money for more convenience if I clearly understood the convenience on offer.
Lack of Home Assistant integration makes it a no-go for me personally, as a technical user, but I realize the average person isn't going to care (and probably you shouldn't either). If you did want to support Home Assistant, I think the shortest path would be MQTT support. You don't need to do a custom integration. It's fully discoverable and automatic if you adhere to their expected structure: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/vacuum.mqtt/
Anyway, no idea if any of that is useful, especially since "nerdy person who roots consumer hardware" isn't exactly your target market, but maybe something in that brain dump is useful info!
1. Yes, our core users are young families: working parents with young children and pets. Clutter and rate of entropy is just higher. :)
2. The fundamental reason for reengineering and reinventing robot floor cleaners with Matic is that disc robots are relatively inferior and suck (literally and figuratively).
Few issues that I as user encountered: 1) constantly getting stuck, chewing wires, dog toys, etc. 2) small bin size and my wife hates the big docks - she just thinks they are ugly. (People go out of their way to hide appliances behind cabinets, so why do we need to tolerate these ugly bricks. 3) Noise. Not only vacuum is noisy but docks are like rocket ship taking off - doesn’t work with pets or young kiddos. 4) Can’t get to sides and corners - circle shape. Vacuum at the bottom is literally 2 inches away from the side 5) and, can’t tell it where, what, how to clean. Most times I don’t want the whole home cleaned or whole room — I just need to clean kitchen are clean where we cook/chop veggies etc.
** However, it just doesn’t make sense to why we are tolerating these Gen 1 robots that were invented in early 2000s. They were great for that time. But they are Nokias and Blackberries. Now tech and AI is so much better, so it’s time to reinvent and build iPhone of home robots.
(200+ self driving car start-ups, same amount building industrial robots, none in home space…why?)
2. We believe that just like self-driving cars need Google Street View maps (which Sebastian Thrun built first) and GPS, fully autonomous indoor robots need precise SLAM and high fidelity 3D maps. With Matic, we are letting robots build maps on the fly and remember its location in precise manner.
3. You are right that mostly we have built table stakes features. However, the it’s about HOW we have built them. With our vision-first approach, disc robot ceiling is our floor. That’s just the foundation.
And HOW is about making robot that actually works and is intelligent.
How can we call robot intelligent if it continuously needs to bump? If it doesn’t even know what’s in front of it?
A robot that can navigate our home the way we do is in itself a huge step forward and for that it needs precise and dynamic maps (we constantly observe when things move).
We have done few things: - reinvented sweeping and vacuuming to adjust suction, brush roll speed, height of CH etc. based on type of surface and type of dirt. (We don’t take vacuums over rugs with frills and we mop wine stains - why can’t robot do that).
- first if it’s kind self-cleaning mop that doesn’t just drag dirt with it like mop pads. Instead we squeeze dirty water and dirt out the bin with every turn.
- a completely new mobility system invented for the modern homes. disc robots don’t climb shag rugs. We do.
- quiet. Vacuums at 55dBA and mops at 52dBA. This is really important for robots to do things on our behalf in homes. They can’t be noisy.
- with our ID not only families love looking at it but kids and pets are not afraid of it.
And, we are just getting started. By end of the next year we will be adding embeddings and simple chat like command/control based on visual maps.
Stay tuned!
For the end users, there's a telegram group where people can share standardised PCBs for rooting common robots sold in Europe. And the project's main developer is even in there actively helping out. But discussion about forks or custom PCBs is frowned upon, as that would only confuse the non-devs.
On the developer side, thought, making things easy and standardised required some trade-offs like not supporting any robot-specific functionality. That means if you're a power user, you'll probably run your own fork.
So in a way, installing Valetudo moves you from a Chinese closed-source walled garden into a European source-available walled garden. That said, I'm extremely happy with my (private, unsupported) fork running on 2x Dreame W10.
It has become quite a community around the software and breakout hardware in itself
While I haven't done much with it yet, I also appreciate the relatively straightforward HomeAssistant integration.
Ok after reading the docs, it looks like that board specifically fixes the non standard pitch. I managed without it, but I did have some difficulties with poor connection that the board would have avoided
* Connects to robot's serial port. You'll need a USB-to-TTL cable if you don't have one around to connect to your computer. Z10 Pro uses this method.
* Connects to robot's USB port (still via the debug header). You'll need three of the four wires from a USB cable. You can literally cut open a USB cable here, or get a breakout board. L10s Ultra uses this method.
Plus misc jumper wires to connect it all. The boot button is connecting a wire to boot select, a wire to ground, and touching these wires together (really, the PCB is all three of these things: boot button + serial + direct USB).
But this is really awesome. I don’t love the idea of Roomba having a floor plan of my house and constantly prompting me to buy more crap directly in-app, and HA integration is fantastic. Would allow for far more dynamic scheduling for one thing (everyone out of the house? Get to it! Prioritize this room over that one. People arriving back? Head back to base. Night before garbage day? Notify me to empty/replace collection bag.)
[1] https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/supported-robots.html
Update: pleasantly surprised: https://iroboroomba.com/how-to-use-roomba-without-wifi/
One of their models is the only decent vacuum that can automatically avoid pet faeces.
Let’s say this option costs 100€. Should all users of Valetudo donate 100€?
"But, at the end of the day, you must understand that it is still privately-owned. You’re on someone else’s property over which you have no power at all. You will have to show the necessary respect. And - most importantly - you need to understand that letting you into this garden is a gift and should be treated as such.
If you don’t like this garden because you don’t like how it’s structured, or you feel like it’s missing something, or maybe I choose the wrong flowers to plant over there that’s fine. It’s just not for you then. You can leave at any time.
There is simply no ground to stand on to demand change to the garden."
"Only supported robots are supported
While this may sound incredibly dumb, it unfortunately needs saying nonetheless.
Only supported robots are supported. Unsupported robots are not supported.
If you have an unsupported robot, it is not supported. There is no support for it because it is not supported."
For example, the buying recommendations mentions Roborock S8/S8+, but the supported robots page doesn't mention it.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"Please note that this list is exhaustive. These are the supported robots."
https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/supported-robots.html
The supported robots are the ones on that list, nothing more. The firmware might work on more of them though.
Despite being about private property, I still think this bit of text or something like it should be added to the support page of most OSS projects.
Valetudo is the roman name for the greek goddess Hygieia, which is the goddess of health, cleanliness and hygiene.
We get "valetudinarian" from this word, one who worries (excessively) about one's health.
Valetudo is a perfect example of a project at risks of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization - OEMs can easily slap it onto their vacuums and prevent users and developers from changing the firmware.
This is exactly what GPLv3 was invented for.
That’s the one I have and I’m interested in Valetudo for hooking into HA but I wish there was an iOS app for it.
Valetudo support seems to be coming, however "it's done when it's done"; the necessary work is more dramatic due to the different protocol Ecovacs uses for cloud communication.
Until then: I would make sure not to update the device firmware. Just be prepared to wait and keep an eye on the release notes and/or Valetudo webpage (unlike with other projects, you can safely assume it to be up to date).
[1] https://events.ccc.de/congress/2023/hub/en/event/sucking_dus...
I just like that thanks to this, my robot vacuum works like a standalone device that does not communicate with anything, yet does exactly what it should.
Checkout the telegram channels. Watch the maintainer yell at people, call them names, and watch the supporters eat it up.
As much as I like the project and appreciate its concept, but this is a deal breaker unless your robot is out of warranty, because you will be under the mercy of some random developer instead of the vendor.
