Dyson announces a robot vacuum cleaner | Hacker News Reader

Dyson announces a robot vacuum cleaner

laggano.com

26 pointstdaltonc14 comments

I'd be curious to see how all the sensors hold up after a couple months of regular cleaning. I have an older model Roomba and am blown away by how durable it is. The sensors are extremely primitive and it doesn't have any capabilities to map rooms like newer robotic vacuums, but it manages to do a great job without any dust getting in after months of use.

Granted, I haven't had an opportunity to tear apart newer models, but I'd be really surprised if the more advanced sensors would be much more prone error after a bit of dust gets stuck to them.

Interesting that there is an old style drafting board behind Dyson in the video. About a robot "high tech" vacuum cleaner. Hard to believe that company in particular uses a manual drawing process or why anyone would use that as a prop either.

Gordon Murray (Designed the McLaren F1 and a lot of top F1 cars) shuns CAD and does most of his work at 1:1 with pen and paper.

Gordon Murray is 68. It's more likely about what he is used to than paper being more effective than CAD. Drafting on paper sounds ridiculous to me.

I still use pen and paper for writing (and thinking). Also an old fashioned medium, but also a preference to satisfy my occasional Luddite mindset.

I still use paper file folders to organize "deals" that I am working on. Complete with labels and several file carts.

However I rigged up a shell routine that grabs the lp printer file on my mac in a way that I can then use spotlight (osx) [1] to instantly find and bring up the pdf so I can also find what I need that way. (And I even have a "fake" printer setup in case I don't want to have an actual paper printout for some reason.

[1] So the shell routine looks at the file and determines if it's text file, a .ps (postscript) file, or already .pdf and appends the right suffix so it can be open by clicking and spotlight can search it.

There is other, fairly extensive, discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8267622 (also currently on the front page)

I would like to see HN start to kill these posts. The previous one was near the top of the front page, linked directly to the product, and was submitted four hours before this causing a large discussion. I guess it's a time consuming thing to police but this article seems to contain nothing more substantial than the original submission - it just causes a fragmented discussion.

If enough users flag the post, I believe it drops off the front page. It obviously is not the same as killing a post, but it is probably the most straightfoward method for community moderation.

Judging from the brush, it looks like it is designed to clean carpet. Roomba had been designing their robots to clean all types of flooring. I don't think Dyson will be a big threat to Roomba.

Does it automatically plug itself in after cleaning the room. And dump the bin into a trash can.

Want!

Why does it need a brush bar if it is a vacuum cleaner? Seems like marketing lingo to me.

The camera and navigation are an expected improvement, but other than that doesn't look better than my old Roomba clone, it is even missing some features.

Brush bars help lift hair off the carpet. They also help lift the carpet pile which some people like.

I'm kind of surprised to read people who don't look after their vacuum cleaner. Whatever brand it is: change the bags (if it uses them); change the filters; occasionally give it a clean.

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