Hacker News Reader

Comment by gspencley | Hacker News Reader

Why the hell do I need my VACUUM to have a camera and an internet connection?!

cameras for object detection, fine ... but there are VERY few things in my home that I need or want to be connected to a network, and my vacuum cleaner is not one of them. And why do I even need this thing to persist images in any capacity (even locally, let alone remotely)?

Despite being a software engineer for 25 years I'm starting to become a luddite because of things like this. One of these days I might just pack up everything and go live off grid.

View on HN

My xiaomi uses wifi to communicate to the app on your phone and its dock. The app is useful, you can specify a zone to clean from a previous lidar scan of your place, have it come and do a spot cleanup, establish schedules or trigger a clean while you are away, or you can control it manually with directional controls.

That being said I think it would still work fine without the wifi doing a whole area clean with the button on the top, it just might say its having trouble finding its dock and you would need to carry it home after its finished.

> trigger a clean while you are away

Perfect for those occasions when I'm away on vacation but the dirt on my kitchen floor back home is bothering me...

Honestly half these features only exist because they're easy to implement and make the feature list longer, not because they're actually useful. And the other half don't require the internet, I set schedules on my roomba that has no radio in it, it has four buttons and a seven segment display.

it is nice when you are at work, nobody is at home, so you trigger it

I have a cat and its pretty much a guarentee I need to have the vacuum run every few days. Its still useful to check in with it. Sometimes the vacuum gets stuck. Sometimes something blocks it and prevents it from cleaning a room, and I can tell that because I have a map of the lidar scan with a path drawn of the vacuum route on it in the app.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com