Depressed as I am about having to write yet another review of a crappy Torchwood episode, I’ve decided to just write a bit about the latest addition to our household: K9 Mk II
This story requires a bit of history.
A few years ago, probably in 2002, we bought a first-generation iRobot Roomba: K9 Mk I. For those not familiar with Roombas, they are robotic floor vacuums. We liked it and it seemed to work, but, all too soon, the side brush mechanism for cleaning along the walls broke. iRobot sent us a replacement part, but after re-assembly, K9 never worked again. He just sort of started, turned slightly to the left and stopped.
And so, K9 sat under a futon gathering dust in entirely a different fashion than was intended.
With the kids keeping the floor fairly dirty at all times and Irene claiming not to have enough time to vacuum the house regularly, I bought her a brand new Roomba for our anniversary and Christmas. (Yes, I know, it sounds like a gift only a husband in a sitcom would buy for an anniversary. Fortunately, Irene is from Taiwan, the Isle of Geek and this kind of gift actually works for her.) And so K9 Mk II came to our household.
The new one is nicer, as well it should be. They’ve had several years to improve it. This one can be scheduled to run at night and even locates and returns to its charging station when finished. It all works pretty much as advertised.
There’s one little problem though: Asian hair. My wife’s hair has the tensile strength of steel and every 2 or 3 cleaning cycles, I have to disassemble to brush assembly and literally cut the hair off of it with a knife.
After having performed this maintenance on the new Roomba, I dug out the old one and decided to clean it off and check the brush assemblies. Sure enough, they’d been improperly re-assembled. They’re much more difficult than the new one, but I took it all apart, cleaned everything up, put it all back together right, switched it on and… it didn’t work.
At that point, I figured there wasn’t much to loose, so I took it to a friend who likes to tinker with robotics. He discovered what appears to be a whole sub-culture of Roomba devotees. He ran it through all the diagnostics and everything appeared to be correct.
Still it refused to run.
Finally, he found a couple people online with the same exact problem. They didn’t know what was wrong, either. Then someone said they had the same problem and found out it was the battery, despite the fact that the display lights indicated it was OK. Since all Roomba batteries are alike, I popped the battery from the new one into the old one and… it worked!
Decision time: Spend nearly $50 on a new battery, or let a working Roomba waste? I went cheap and bought one from eBay, which actually had to be soldered into the battery pack.
Our laundry room is partially exposed to the outside. The room temperature swings with the outdoor temperature and dust gets in. We use it to store a lot of stuff we rarely use, so it is quite a mess. This weekend, I decided to clean it up to the point where I could loose K9 (I) on it. In places, the dust was thick like sawdust. There had been some floor rugs in the room, but they had begun to decompose from the summer heat. (I threw them out.)
After K9’s first pass, it didn’t look that much better. The dust compartment hardly had anything in it. Was it all for nothing? I checked the brushes and they were choked with carpet shag from the deteriorating rugs. I cleaned the brushes and sent him running again. This time, it collected more dust, but the room wasn’t clean yet. In fact, he had even distributed the dust all around the floor.
For the third and final pass, I put both K9s in the room and set them to cleaning. it was rather fun watching them bash into each other. (Somebody should really make a spectator sport of out of it.) When they’d finished, the room was clean.
I emptied the first Roomba’s dust catcher and it was about as full as the time before. I emptied the second and was shocked. It had nearly 5 times as much dust collected in it.
Clearly the enhancements over the years are not just in the extra features, the new unit does a much better job cleaning
I read an article the other day saying that Roomba is making inroads into homes, but people are still buying them as gifts for others rather than themselves. Apparently they feel it’s not really good enough to use, but novel enough to give away.
I’ll add my voice to the crowd and say that they really do work, and they’ve obviously gotten better with time. Who knows what’s in store for the future?
You can get more information on the Roomba at my Amazon shop.
Technorati Tags: Blog, Dr Who, Robot, Roomba, Technology
