Hacker News Reader

Comment by visarga | Hacker News Reader

I have a Xiaomi Mi robot vacuum and it is capable of mapping the whole house and showing me on the phone where it is and what was the cleaning trajectory. It's quite smart, it understands room layout, and can handle many rooms without attendance.

Example of house map: https://www.androidcentral.com/sites/androidcentral.com/file...

View on HN

I only wish I could tap the map and have it go there. I keep having to operate it using the phone controls, and the signal goes to the US and back even though the damn vacuum is right next to me. This leads to > 1 sec response times, which make it impossible to steer.

I agree, pointing to a location, or even selecting a rectangle on the map should work.

Yes, especially given the fact that it already does the exact same thing when you tell it to go back to the dock (ie it finds a way to a spot on the map, its dock).

Some of the Samsung robot vacuums can do this: http://support-us.samsung.com/cyber/popup/iframe/pop_trouble...

And if they pull a Logitech (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/logitech-to-shut-dow...) I guess you'd have at least a tiny spot on the floor which will be very clean.

If you could reverse engineer it I would fake the control server (e.g. have a router that will spoof DNS) and have the spoof server be in your network. I wonder if the server does anything more intelligent than relay the messages from your phone, or if it has SSL...

Hah, man-in-the-middle for a vacuum cleaner. Welcome to the future.

Roomba will do this as well.

https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/roomba_cl...

If you don't mind me asking, how does it work? Would you say it vacuums good? I've tried a few Chinese brands and they've all not done much of anything besides move dirt around.

I am more satisfied with it that I initially imagined I would be. It might not get everything - for example, if you have too much dust or lint, in one pass. But it gets 97% and if you put it daily, it's effect is 100%. As a device it is cute and has a nice voice. It tends to "steal" USB cables and slippers, so you need to put those safe before you run it. In fact I was amazed when I realized that for the first time there is a non-living agent in my house that can steal slippers and cables. It's clearly a small step for a robot, but a large leap for me.

Not OP but I own one aswell.. I really like that thing for the price. It Cleans decently in a good amount of time.

I Italien setup is a bit hard because you have to change language from Chinese to English but other than that no complains.

In tests I always see it go either head to header or beat the 700$ more expensive roomba.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com