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Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

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Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#91

Post by forinti »

tzs wrote: post #57

People are mentioning alternatives, but do any of them have the repairability of a Roomba? The maker was famous for keeping parts readily available for even the oldest models, and making it so replacing parts was easy (although I've heard that in mid-2024 they started on some model making wheels, chassis, and motors an integrated unit that the user cannot easily service). If you were happy with your Roomba you could…

My Roomba has many years by now, and I've swapped a few parts.

But I've bought parts from China, because my local dealer sells the parts at very high prices, if he ever has them in stock.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#92

Post by vjk800 »

willis936 wrote: post #33
kingstnap wrote: post #18

I wonder what happens to the app and cloud functionality. > Under the restructuring, vacuum cleaner maker Shenzhen PICEA will receive the entire equity stake in the reorganized company. The company’s common stock will be wiped out under the proposed Chapter 11 plan. Hopefully they keep the lights on.

I had a roomba i5 fully stop working earlier this year. It said it couldn't connect to the internet but I believe what it meant was "some aspect of the remote server has decayed to the point that it no longer works with this platform". I threw it in the trash, vowed to never let this happen again, and got a valetudo machine. I think the lights have been off for some time already.

We moved this year and couldn't get my old(ish) Roomba i5 to work in my new wifi easily. I've been meaning to debug the problem further, but if it can be confirmed that it's an iRobot issue and there's nothing I can do, it would save some effort.

It sucks, though, that I can use my fucking vacuum cleaner because a remote server of the manufacturer has decayed. Does anyone know if there are robotic vacuums that work fully locally without remote servers?

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#93

Post by vjk800 »

syntaxing wrote: post #66
tzs wrote: post #57

People are mentioning alternatives, but do any of them have the repairability of a Roomba? The maker was famous for keeping parts readily available for even the oldest models, and making it so replacing parts was easy (although I've heard that in mid-2024 they started on some model making wheels, chassis, and motors an integrated unit that the user cannot easily service). If you were happy with your Roomba you could…

Thanks to the full Chinese supply chain, you can replace every single part of the roborock. Even if Roborock doesn’t sell it directly, someone does. I’ve owned a couple and I haven’t had any main board die. But you can buy anything from the wheels, to main board, to lidar online.

I liked how you could buy an official Roomba spare parts kit, though.

In a mechanical device meant for messy places, parts necessarily wear out quicker than in most electronics, and being able to buy and swap out the parts easily seemed like a nice feature.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#94

Post by teyc »

olivierlacan wrote: post #34

If you've used any non-iRobot vacuum alternatives in the last 5 years and ever owned a Roomba in the past there should be nothing surprising about this headline. It's shocking to me how good Roborock mop-vacuums are for example, Eufy vacuums are nice as well. They still run into unavoidable issues, but they're: much quieter even at their highest setting; show you how they map out the space; allow you to easily custom…

I read a story about Dreame. The founder worked in aerospace, but wanted to make a mass-produced motor with aerospace standards. So he modelled air flow using aerospace tools, built the motor to tight tolerances. Conventional vacuum motors run at 30k rpm, his runs at 100k rpm. Then he standardises on a single motor, for all his devices, robovacs, stick vacs etc, so he gets scale.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#95

Post by RGamma »

olivierlacan wrote: post #34

If you've used any non-iRobot vacuum alternatives in the last 5 years and ever owned a Roomba in the past there should be nothing surprising about this headline. It's shocking to me how good Roborock mop-vacuums are for example, Eufy vacuums are nice as well. They still run into unavoidable issues, but they're: much quieter even at their highest setting; show you how they map out the space; allow you to easily custom…

Currently looking to make my living space robot friendly, I wonder: can they clean hard to reach spots behind doors or under the ledge of a sofa (I can't remove every obstacle)?

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#96

Post by pandemic_region »

forinti wrote: post #91
tzs wrote: post #57

People are mentioning alternatives, but do any of them have the repairability of a Roomba? The maker was famous for keeping parts readily available for even the oldest models, and making it so replacing parts was easy (although I've heard that in mid-2024 they started on some model making wheels, chassis, and motors an integrated unit that the user cannot easily service). If you were happy with your Roomba you could…

My Roomba has many years by now, and I've swapped a few parts. But I've bought parts from China, because my local dealer sells the parts at very high prices, if he ever has them in stock.

Same here, AliExpress for the custom parts like brushes etc at 1/5th of the price.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#97

Post by patrickk »

parineum wrote: post #40
kayson wrote: post #25

Does anyone have recommendations for a robot vacuum that can handle dog hair and won't sell my floorplan to advertisers?

Find a vacuum that supports valetudo[1] and a brush/roller like this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F54134JY [1] https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/supported-robots.html

Word to the wise: installing Valetudo can be a nerve wracking task even for the tech savvy. On my model, a Dreame L10s Ultra (there’s about three similarly named models and only this exact one is valetudo compatible, and isn’t sold any more) you are strongly recommended to use a custom pcb and to use Debian to run the commands, and not in a VM. If something goes wrong you can permanently brick your device. I ran into all kinds of esoteric sounding errors, and I half gave up and one point since I was burning valuable free time on evenings and weekends to get it done (busy family with small kids and stressful job). The robot sat unused for several months but I eventually got it done. I’m glad I did it but it was an ordeal.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#98

Post by jack_tripper »

hurturue wrote: post #3

They outsourced production to China thinking that they can just do the marketing in US. Now they learnt that Chinese can do marketing too.

>Now they learnt that Chinese can do marketing too.

Roborock didn't win because of doing marketing, they won by being technically superior and word of mouth, in spite of lack of marketing, at least in the west.

Same how Japanese cars beat US made cars in the 1980s even though US cars had the most amount of advertising in the media. Even Steve Jobs said in the 90s that US brands have the best marketing and win all meaningless "awards by industry critics", but if you ask consumers which products are best, they all say the Japanese ones.

Chinese products are now the new Japanese. I still have no idea why westerners assumed "Chinese can't innovate, they can only replicate".

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#99

Post by patrickk »

prawn wrote: post #46
ghaff wrote: post #41

My brother has a house that is pretty much custom-made for a robo-vacuum. One level, no transitions, they have pets. And they like it well enough (not an iRobot)--and it still gets tangled up in stuff from time to time. I have a 2-level house. Even after some house work, one room that probably still has too high a transition. A lot of different surfaces (And I'm not religious with cords and the like.) I'm guessing th…

A friend has a robot vac and just puts it in a room, closes the door, and leaves it for a couple of hours. Avoids the issue of worrying about which areas don't have kids' toys around, Lego, cords, etc. Higher touch than is ideal, but if you're already working from home and the kids are at school, it can work.

You can typically select certain rooms to clean rather than “clean all” on decent brands like roborock or Dreame. You can put it on a schedule too.
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