Comment by hmottestad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hmottestad | Hacker News Reader

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I hope iRobot manages to survive. I have one of their J9 robots with a camera and object detection. It’s amazing how it can vacuum our toy-riddled floor.

I’m very weary of buying a robot vacuum with a camera from a Chinese company. I don’t fully trust iRobot, but I trust them much more than I trust Chinese brands.

I also couldn’t see myself going back to a robot vacuum without a camera. After I got kids our old Neato vacuum robot got very little use since it always required that everything was picked up off the floor.

That being said I’m quite frustrated by my new J9. It’s supposed to have a feature called SmartScrub, but it’s not in the app. The robot is also supposed to drive back to the base to refill its water tank, but it hasn’t done that a single time since we bought it a month ago. The combination of vacuuming and mopping is also a bit unfortunate since it sucks up a lot of humid air when passing over areas that it’s already mopped, causing a buildup of wet-ish dirt in the air duct.

iRobot is getting left behind, technologically.

I'll omit the competitor that I use now. I'll just say that it has a base that empties the robot dust bin, refills the clean tank, empties the dirty water tank, washes and dries the mop. And the mop actually looks like something that resembles a mop (and rotates), it's far better than the 'swiffer' kind of thing that the Braava has, or that the J9 has. I don't see the same wet dirt issue because the navigation takes care of that.

It does have a camera and the parent company is indeed Chinese.

Neato is even worse and their robots aren't much better than they were 5 years ago. They started out really strong but any improvements were marginal.

in case you didn't know neato is suspending operations and closing up shop

As someone looking for a robot vacuum, care to just share to name?

It's probably a Roborock. I had a Roomba that I found disappointing for years and after reading positive reviews of Roborock here and on Reddit, I finally pulled the plug on an S7 MaxV Ultra. Worth every penny.

To be clear, the CCP definitely has a detailed map of my home. But man, I've got two dogs that shed a lot, and it's great. Sometimes you've gotta accept the tradeoffs, y'know?

I don't know the parent's brand but I have a CECOTECT CONGA 11090 that fills exactly the description. CECOTEC is a spanish brand tho, and may not be available everywhere, and almost sure they manufacter the hardware in China so very possible the same specs are offered by other brands elsewhere, but those are my two cents

From valetudo.cloud: Conga is a brand that uses existing robot designs with a slightly customized cloud.They’re not a robot manufacturer.

Sounds like the Dreame L20 Ultra. I have it, it's miles better than any irobot I've owned.

Maybe Ecovacs deebot OMNI

If it's compatible with that open firmware/ home assistant I'm in for one at least.

Ours is collecting dust because it was so flaky. You can solve the base problem by putting some grippy tape in the wheel wells. (They made the charging base out of some plastic that's impassible for the robot.)

I realized I was spending 30-60 minutes debugging and manually charging our roombas for each (usually aborted) run. Once the Amazon acquisition was announced, I realized it meant that they'd inevitably send upskirt angle shots of the family to Bezos for ad targeting and forwarding to local law enforcement agencies. That was the final straw.

Supposedly, the Chinese ones are slightly better for privacy because you can MITM their backend cloud connection and point it at a local version of whatever service the robot thinks it needs in order to work.

I bought a broom and mop. They're much less work. So were the older, dumber roombas (especially the square mops from the Mint acquisition). YMMV.

> They made the charging base out of some plastic that's impassible for the robot.

The _exact_ same problem Braava has. Whenever the wheels collect a small amount of dust, they slip too much and the robot can't climb. I actually added sandpaper to the base to help with the grip. Seems like such an easy fix; it's mind boggling that the same issue is present across models, for years!

> I bought a broom and mop. They're much less work.

Yeah, although, if you have pets, even a not so reliable robot will massively cut the amount of cleaning you have to manually do.

Roborock E4 (older model) runs without any app connection at all, not sure about other models but that definitely eliminates any privacy issues and is significantly easier than MITM :)

Do you know which ones can be MITM?

Personally my experience with iRobot has not been smooth. I have a dog that sheds a shit ton of fur.

The robot would get clogged frequently. A few parts would just stop working. Went through 2 replacements before calling it quits.

Switched to Roborock and haven’t looked back. Going on 1 yr now.

I think the best products have switched from cameras to LiDAR.

The camera is there for object detection, so that it can avoid all the toys that are lying around on the floor.

I think most of the competitors will use a camera for object detection and a LiDAR for navigation, since LiDAR is faster than VSLAM.

> I hope iRobot manages to survive.

Seems like an easy company to replicate (and it has been too)

How is a company 10,000 miles away from you going to hurt you compared to a local one that has access to all government services (and vice versa)? I'd rather prefer Chinese or Russian companies to spy on me because what are they going to do with it that would matter? Will I get more spam in Mandarin/Cyrillic I can't decipher anyway?

This is completely ignorant of how influence works and how espionage assets are developed.

A foreign entity would have no obstructions to using collected information as ruthlessly as possible, whereas even a corrupt/politically-motivated/unrestrained domestic entity would have to weigh the comparatively massive risk of being implicated or exposed.

“what are they going to do with it?”

If you have valuable information or responsibilities, that could be motivation enough for foreign agents to seek leverage. If you don’t, then it’s equally fantastic to think the CIA gives a shit about you for some reason.

We are talking about a vacuum cleaner that is 99% of the time parked in some closet. What kind of valuable information are they going to get? Now compare it with Amazon Echo, your TV with a webcam/microphone, your smartphone - those are far higher risks.

> How is a company 10,000 miles away from you going to hurt you compared to a local one that has access to all government services (and vice versa)? I'd rather prefer Chinese or Russian companies to spy on me because what are they going to do with it that would matter? Will I get more spam in Mandarin/Cyrillic I can't decipher anyway?

Don't forget – if someone unlocks your door and leaves it ajar, then anyone can get in.

Chinese companies are not well known for their cyber security practices. Even if you don't care how they could use this information (either individually, or in the aggregate across millions of people), you should also care about who else would be able to hack into the feed.

You don't want a "kia boyz" situation with a camera in your home. Imagine some kid finds an easily exploitable vulnerability and releases some software allowing anyone to tap into your camera? This has happened with security cameras already. It's even worse these days with cloud connected equipment, all you need is a vulnerability in the cloud command and control.

And, although most US agencies are not allowed to collect data from citizens in US soil, they can (and have) collected data procured from elsewhere.

The bottom line is, the same information can end up much, much closer to you.

Finding anything valuable in vacuum robot video feed might be similar to trying to find a needle in a haystack - who has the capacity to go through billions of hours of videos and analyzing if there is anything worth attention? Both companies and hackers would go bankrupt pretty quickly.

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