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Robot vacuums are brilliant. It's worth pointing out that a big vacuum cleaner does a better job at collecting dust than a robot vacuum. One run with a high-powered wired vacuum probably collects as much as 10 runs with a robot one; you see a little dust collected every day because it's not collecting everything on every run. However, the benefit of a robot is that it runs every day. So it's less efficient in the short run, but in the long run it gets the job done. Streaming vs batch. :-)

Depending on how old your carpet is (10+ years), it could be the foam backing underneath disintegrating and getting sucked through the carpet. Do you have any high traffic areas that are obviously more worn than the rest of the carpet? If so, you need new carpet.

I have wood floors, not carpet... this being said, it's the thin wood type, not hard floorboards, not sure what's underneath...

There should be a different type of foam layer. Modern laminate flooring usually involves a layer of hard foam underneath to help deaden sound. So it could also be contributing.

>I'd expect each day to be a bit less, but no, it's about the same.

That tells me your cleaner is either not powerful enough or you need to run it more often. When I used mine (not even daily), it would be a lot initially and after a few runs would pick up less.

Of course, my "less" may just be the baseline that you're seeing.

As for dust, people used to say 90% of dust is dead skin cells. That claim is often disputed.

After reading about the house mapping of some robotic vacuum cleaners I'm hesitant to let one into my home.

... Why? What's so confidential about your floor plan?

Ah, the good ol' "if you have nothing to hide" stance.

More that iRobot disclosed plans to sell the floor plans to the homes of their product users without telling them.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/nation-now/2017/07/25/ro...

I do not count a clause buried in a terms of service as informed consent.

4% of global revenue under the upcoming GDPR. Can't wait.

rubs hands together I really can't wait for GDPR

> I do not count a clause buried in a terms of service as informed consent.

Neither do EU courts. I guess this "feature" is only available in the US?

Could you send me a detailed copy of your floor plan? Ideally, SVG? Thanks! Oh, and anything else the robot sends too, like your IP address and maybe GPS coordinates?

If you're willing to send, great -- thank you. I'd love to know, for undisclosed reasons. My email is in my profile, and you can even encrypt the files you send me using PGP. Although note that I'll be putting it on my Azure account and leaving it there for eternity.

If you're not willing to send me that, then please don't even try the "you've got nothing to hide" line, because you clearly do! I'm going to start challenging this every time I hear this excuse because it's demonstrably nonsense when challenged.

You won't send me that SVG because you know I have no fucking business knowing what your house looks like. Neither does the robot cleaning company. The files could be kept on the device without any real loss of functionality. As Washuu posted below, they are now selling these floor plans. Should I make money off the floor plan you send me?

But couldn't this all be found out in public records? Look up the neighborhood, then who built the homes. Most builders don't have more than a few dozen floor plans.

In that case, why don't the companies just access those public files? Why build their own floor plans and send them back to the cloud to be sold? Why is there even a market for buying floor plans from people who didn't realize they were being mapped from their fucking vacuum cleaner.

You can't even trust a vacuum cleaner. I'm really coming to despise technology companies.

Because real houses almost never match the plans?

This seems a little paranoid. Everybody does this kind of mapping. Call Home Depot to get an estimate for flooring, and the person they send out laser measures everything and sends you floor plans back accurate to the quarter inch.

I agree with most of what you said, except this bit...

> I have no f---ing business knowing what your house looks like. Neither does the robot cleaning company. The files could be kept on the device without any real loss of functionality. As Washuu posted below, they are now selling these floor plans. Should I make money off the floor plan you send me?

They quite literally do have a business that requires them to know your floor plan, or at least to do a good job. Whether or not they upload it anywhere may be a different matter.

I have a robot that maps my floor plan - admittedly poorly, as we don't let it into every room and it's lidar, so a bit rough and contains no information about doors, windows, or anything I own in my home - but them sending me a push notification to my mobile phone when the robot either completes the cleaning or gets stuck is great. I just open the mobile app and I can see a rough map showing where the robot has been or where they are (if it's stuck), it is actually incredibly useful.

I don't at all question your right to not want a company having that information, I totally get it, but honestly myself and a lot of other people use Google services frequently, so in terms of privacy invasion this is so far down the list it doesn't even register. Yes I've made the choice to use Google services, just as I've made the choice to use a robot vacuum that connect to wi-fi and tells me information I believe is useful.

I do however dislike you suggesting that my robot vacuum should have it's functionality limited because you don't like the company collecting information. Particularly when there's already a super simple solution... just don't setup wi-fi on the robot vac. Problem solved.

>They quite literally do have a business that requires them to know your floor plan

No they don't. Let me be quite clear here: The robot must know your floor plan. The company doesn't need to. Analogy here: Apple sold me a computer running macOS. I get regular updates for XProtect, the built in Anti-Virus. They don't need to know what software I have installed, but the computer does to run that program. That's the difference here -- the local device vs the company (really their cloud).

>Whether or not they upload it anywhere may be a different matter.

Do they need the floor plans in the cloud? Or can the software work with it on the device, that's my question. Even privacy aside, does that mean if the company goes bankrupt, or my internet connection isn't working, that my vacuum cleaner is now broken? Even though the software on board could continue functioning fine? There's a longevity concern here -- I could be throwing away a device after months, despite it being functional.

>I do however dislike you suggesting that my robot vacuum should have it's functionality limited because you don't like the company collecting information.

Nothing you suggested above requires the cloud. Your phone could connect to the robot, through the cloud proxy for when you are not on your Wi-Fi network / otherwise cannot make a direct connection, and could pull the floor plan data from that. The fact this would also work over the LAN would provide a bit of capability to continue customizing the robot and seeing data even after the company's cloud has disappeared. I can't play some games because they had DRM for servers that no longer exist. It really sucks.

Additionally, I'm more asking for transparency and choice, rather than "no cloud features". I just see people trying to justify forced cloud features as "your privacy doesn't matter".

Hmm, I think as someone who doesn't own one of these vacuums you're jumping to quite a few conclusions about how they operate, and how the businesses that sell these devices operate.

1. I know of no manufacturer who requires you to connect your robot vac to their cloud. They function perfectly without being connected, and will continue to do so if the company goes up in flames over night.

> I can't play some games because they had DRM for servers that no longer exist. It really sucks.

DRM is very different to a company providing me with cloud access to information about my vacuum cleaner. DRM restricts (or "manages") your rights to use a product. The smart functionality is additional functionality they're offering. I don't have to use it if I don't want to, my vacuum isn't going to stop functioning because their servers go offline.

> Additionally, I'm more asking for transparency and choice, rather than "no cloud features". I just see people trying to justify forced cloud features as "your privacy doesn't matter".

No one is forcing anything upon you. There are plenty of "dumb" robots that don't have cloud functionality but will navigate around your home, buy one if you prefer it. Even still, the ones that do have cloud functionality, that functionality is used entirely at your own discretion.

2. You're assuming you know better than the company about how to offer this functionality.

You're suggesting the robot vac could just store the information on itself and when I'm not home I'll connect to the robot to retrieve said information. Am I supposed to set up port forwarding so I can connect to the robot vac from the outside world? What if I don't want my robot vac exposed to the outside world, which by the way, I don't.

The alternative would be that it pings home (a server somewhere) every 3 seconds or so, in order to see if I just decided I want to communicate with the robot. Then to setup something like a direct web socket connection and hope the routers along the way play nice. Doesn't sound like the best idea for battery life.

What about when my robot vac gets stuck (as previously described) and its battery inevitably runs out? Which by the way, is precisely what happens. Then how will I query where my robot is now that it's flat stuck under some piece of furniture somewhere around the house?

What about if the power goes out? What about when my home Internet goes down?

3. Security and convenience are almost always at odds. It's a trade off. Put your money where your mouth is and chose a manufacturer who aligns well with what you prefer.

I can think of a tonne of ways I could improve my Macbook's security, they're not particularly convenient though. For example, instead of Apple requiring me to connect to their servers to get updates (how dare they?), why don't they just have an option to mail the updates out on USB? That'd improve my security... it sure as hell doesn't sound convenient for anyone involved though.

There might be some super elaborate way (port forwarding, wall-powered base station charger is a computer etc.) that allows me to have similar functionality to what I've presently got available to me. However, it's not likely to be as convenient as the existing "cloud" solutions.

4. Just because a company has your information doesn't mean the company is evil.

Just because a company is storing data on a server somewhere doesn't automatically mean they're planning to come rob your house. Read their policies, it's highly unlikely that any vacuum company having a rough idea of your floor plan is going to negatively impact your existence on this planet in any way - unless you're getting high blood pressure over the issue for some reason (which I'd say is on you). I'm pretty sure my robot vac provider doesn't even have my address on file, my rough floor plan isn't of much use to the nefarious type.

On the other hand, if they're using my robot's navigation information to improve the robot, so that it doesn't get stuck on my shiny dinning room chair legs, or clothes left on the floor of my walk-in robe, then I'm all for it.

We used to have all our utilities work offline for decades and they work like they are supposed to. Issues were fixed during R&D by analysing every situation that might break the product.

Now, every company wants to collect data or they say the product will not function properly. All of them now needs to access internet for convenience. In a decade, our own belongings will say, I will not work unless you update me.

> In a decade, our own belongings will say, I will not work unless you update me.

I see this happening too, and I don't want any part of it.

Tech is making it way into everything, and it bothers me. Toothbrushes with LCD screens?

Anecdote: Metronomes are all digital now, whereas they used to all be mechanical, like analog watches. The windup mechanism is super simple; it's just a spring with a ratchet on it. The spring is designed to exert a constant force to counteract the natural friction of the pendulum swinging, like an inverted grandfather clock. Such a metronome is simple, straightforward, human-scale understandable from the most basic of investigation. A kid could understand it. Now, with digital metronomes, the damn thing is so tightly integrated that it comes with either a specifically designed IC, an FPGA with EEPROM, or a full CPU with software. Of course they require batteries. Can you figure out how it works from taking it apart? No chance. The chip itself has a stack of PhDs in it; let alone any software. It's fractally complex.

Leave aside Metronome software apps for a moment; these stupid digital metronomes have no swinging arm (a nice indicator to help you get rhythm back), only flashing lights. If/when it breaks, and it will break, let's say 20 years from now, what do I do? I've been programming my entire life and yet I still wouldn't have a clue how to fix it. Nor would anyone else for that matter. That damn thing will go in the bin, and I'll have to buy another. But the model from today won't be available then; I'll be forced to get some other whizz-bang techy thing that is all new and better, and more sophisticated, and even less repairable. Dumb. So yeah, nowadays I have an analog metronome and I'll fix it if it breaks.

The cheap electronic metronomes are just a 555, some passive components and a rotary switch. Diagnosing and fixing one is a really good project for a 10-15yo

> Diagnosing and fixing one is a really good project for a 10-15yo

It does sound fun. But, it'd be a project. Now imagine you had no manuals, voltmeter, or replacement chips. What's a 555? Not so fun now.

Or imagine this another way. You have all the docs, and a fully stocked electronics lab. And in the other corner is someone with a screwdriver and a broken mechanical metronome. Who's faster?

Without a set of watchmaker's tools and the patience of an adult-- those coil springs and gears are pretty frustrating!

> The cheap electronic metronomes are just a 555, some passive components and a rotary switch.

BTW the digital one I have has no moving parts; it has buttons to select the bpm and pattern from pre-programmed options.

     |-=-=-|
     |     |
     | LR  |
     |     |
     |-- --|
     |     |
     *     |      
     |-- - |
     |   |B|
     |   |R|
     |   |-|
    ||     |
    ||Kitch| 
     |     |
     |     |
     |-- --|
     |     |
    ||     ||
    || BR  ||
     |     |
     |-==--|

All rather approximate. Each - is about 1m. * is main door. Address is Laustizer Str. 24, Berlin. Second Floor on the left.

Pics or it didn't happen

People can't take a joke. Haha.

I noticed that entire building facades on your street are hidden in Google Street View (https://imgur.com/a/NzDZP).

I'm curious why is that so? Is it possible due to GDPR?

Possibly German privacy laws? AFAIK they are fairly strong

Way older than GDPR, opting out has been possible for Streetview as long as it is available in Germany. Many people didn't like the idea of Streetview, and the legal status isn't entirely clear (exceptions for photography in public are fairly limited in Germany), so Google added this instead of risking larger PR and legal problems.

You can actually opt out of Street View. This is very common in Germany [1] [2], but I'm also seeing it in Brooklyn.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Street_View_privacy_c...

[2] https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/23/germanys-complicat...

> Could you send me a detailed copy of your floor plan?

This is in the listing information on houses, if you have a business relationship with someone where you know their address, you also know their floor plan.

More than this, in many jurisdictions, it'll be available publicly from a records office even if your home hasn't ever been listed for sale.

Ummm.... Your floorplan is public information... Mine is easy to look up on my towns website. It even shows the location of outdoor features like patios and fences.

Most robotic vacuum cleaners don't map anything at all, they just run around semi-randomly.

Some of them are a little smarter and map your room internally in order to be a bit more efficient and move in more predictable patterns.

And finally, there are a few expensive models that are connected and are able to upload your floor plan. If you don't want to take advantage of that feature you paid good money for, it is a simple matter of not letting the robot in your home WiFi.

The first category of robots start at around $100 and do a decent job at cleaning. I don't think you really need more.

Maybe not have carpeted rooms? They are just dust collectors.

This is a strange image. The carpets aren't a source of dust,and if designed for it, carpets could capture more dust than a wood floor, until they are vacuumed. While the dust in room with a wood floor, would continue to circulate, and perhaps more of it would reach our lungs with a wooden floor.

a carpet most definitely is a source of dust. the fibers inevitable break down and become dust.

Haven't these been around for years?