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Comment by kpil | Hacker News Reader

Before dreaming on, why not make a Roomba that actually works.

I have an older Roomba and a newer BotVac, and the BotVac is slightly more clever, but it's about 10% chance that I won't find it bleeping helplessly on some new minor obstruction that it found. It's impossible to have a house where there are absolutely no cables, dropped socks, dropped toys, rugs, furniture with "tank stopper" properties, curtains that are slightly too low, etc, etc.

When my vacuum cleaner can untangle itself, I will pay silly money for something that takes care of my laundry.

After that, something that loads, unloads and sorts my dishwasher would be nice, but nothing comes close to pairing socks...

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On that last bit - pairing socks: finally threw out 50+ multi-colored pairs and bought 20 in just two colors. All get dumped into one bin after drying. Three blind pulls guarantees a matched pair. Nice timesaver.

Wait until they start fading at different rates...

I personally gave up on this years ago. These days I find myself wearing flip-flops most days, but when I wear shoes, I grab two socks and don't care if they even match. Naturally, my sock purchases have tended towards only black in my preferred style, but for almost two years there was a good chance the socks I wore didn't match at all. 99% of the time people never noticed or cared enough to comment, and the 1% who did made it a fun conversation piece.

You can solve the uneven wear problem by not replacing them in the bin until the bin is empty. The laziest way to do this is to not launder your socks until you run out.

Now I understand why I didn't see what the problem was... :)

Yeah but those pesky kid socks are what kill me.

All of mine are white.

I agree. I had to redo my home to make the Roomba work. Put in smart lightning that would turn on when the Roomba wanted to clean (it can't see in the dark). Put new carpeting in the bedroom because the Roomba would generate errors on it (error 6). Keep all the doors open for it to do all rooms and thus having to rewrite my thermostat to keep heating costs acceptable (leaving all doors open kills your multi-room thermostat system). Replace light-weight furniture with thin legs by sturdier furniture that also had a wide base so the Roomba sensor could detect it and not just push it across the room. Raise the bed so it wouldn't trap itself.

In the end I just returned the Roomba to the store. Too much work.

Agree with your botvac comment. It's quite thorough when it doesn't get hung up on something, but it has eaten (damaged beyond repair) about half a dozen power cables (for laptops, phones, etc) in the 3 years I've had it.

I like it, although it eat my cables and gets stuck. There's potential but it's far from perfect. It finds a lot of dust.

To be honest, the worst part is emptying the dustbin,which i need to do every 2-3 days.

But i forgive it whenever I see it find it's way back to the charger. It's magic.

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