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Comment by dawnerd | Hacker News Reader

Roborock are really nice and not that expensive. I've actually been really impressed with just how well it maps the floors. The other day I had to clean some cat fur out of it mid cycle, placed it in a totally different part of the room that wasn't in sight of the dock and it was able to fairly quickly figure out where it was.

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Have one of those and it is really impressive. Automatically detected all rooms, so that i can just tell it to clean a specific one. No matter where i put it, it knows where it is even if i have rearranged some chairs etc.

Ate 2 charging cables tho

To find out its position relative to the map it uses Simultaneous localization and mapping algorithm.

I bought an S50 from China and it constantly errors out on carpet. It seems to be a common thing, I guess China doesn't do full carpet like we have in the US so it's something they didn't test for on my version.

The lidar is impressive though. Cleans way faster since it's taking efficient paths.

They don't like some patterns, I suspect that straight dark lines are detected as possible drops

Roborock being xiamoi, I'd be cautious about data collection.

Reason why I got a Roomba was because I trust iRobot more

It is probably better for China to have your data then USA, because they probably don't share (unless you live in China)

The roborock S5 and older models can easily be rooted, and you can install alternative open source firmware [0], newer models still require hardware disassembly in order to flash the firmware, so it's not quite user friendly yet [1]

For newer versions you can however extract the API token from the app, and use it to control the vacuum without internet access and block its external internet access, since the vacuum uses a known protocol. [2]

[0] https://github.com/Hypfer/Valetudo

[1] https://github.com/dgiese/dustcloud/issues/213#issuecomment-...

[2] https://github.com/marcelrv/XiaomiRobotVacuumProtocol

I did this with my S5. It's not the easiest operation, but the nice thing about the device is that a factory reset is an actual factory reset, so you can always start over with factory firmware if you mess up.

I use a Wireguard VPN to access the Vacuum's web UI to control it; it has no internet access at all.

It’s on its own WiFi network for this reason.

Roomba isn’t even a close competitor in terms of cleaning performance, especially for the price.

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