My i7 is due for delivery today 😀

Edwood:

 

OK, i'm officially a little bit jealous.

 

I do really like that thing @ face value and would trade my Mi for it... but my Mi was something like a third/quarter of the price! The bang for buck on my Mi is amazing. When Xiomi come out with the same thing it will be $1,000 and I might be ready for an upgrade. I really like the look of the mop/vaccum one too! (Thanks @majiktripp) I might just have to upgrade to that one while I wait!

 

I'll be super interested to see how you get on with it after a month or two. I have to empty my bin manually but I'm also cleaning the brushes quite regularly. No pets, or kids - here, just a wife, with hair - that's enough.

 

 

 

In other news... My Mi needs a service by someone smarter than me. 'Jasper' is doing a bit more squeaking than he should. Anyone know anyone who's capable & competent in Auckland? I could call PBTech or the Xiaomi store I guess...

 

edits: trying to get bbcode / markup / formatting to work

 

I imagine that it won't be long until we start seeing the cheaper alternatives coming out with self emptying bins. It is the next logicial step for all robot vacuums really.

I'll be sure to post an update after a few weeks of having it. I don't imagine the rollers should be too much of an issue for me as I'm a household of two guys with short hair and a short-haired cat

@Edwood - re mopping feature, that link is to a site in Chinese, but this looks like one of the Roborock models with the add-on mop.

Before getting too excited, it may be worth checking out some reviews of how well the mopping function works: from what I've seen, not very well. First off, (on my S50 anyway) it's simply a microfibre pad that get's dragged behind the machine, fed by a water reservoir. I guess this may work for a little bit of superficial dirt, but I doubt not much more. Second, there's no ability for it to work only on hard floors, so for any spaces where carpet meets hard floor it'll potentially do a good job of trying to mop the carpet! I guess one could use a zoned clean to try to mark a specific space, but it's not an ideal situation.

I've not even bothered trying the mop out; where our kitchen area (wooden floor) meets the dining area (carpet) contains a couple of curves, so the results would not be pretty! (And it's not that I wouldn't want it to work - I hate mopping, and would find this a fantastic feature.)

jonathan18:

 

...Second, there's no ability for it to work only on hard floors, so for any spaces where carpet meets hard floor it'll potentially do a good job of trying to mop the carpet!

 

Errr... What!?

OK, so I asked the google to explain and this makes sense I guess. You have to do a specific 'mop' clean, and set the zones for your hard wood floor. I'm substantially fine with that except for the fact that I don't think the app retains the home model. ie. I would have to re-draw the zones every time I want to do a mop. Realistically for me, this is pretty easy, but it still seems stupid that I can't save the home model with named zones and 'floor types'. It's just software right!? :)

My floor is never really dirty... Jasper runs around every day and cleans, but I can't remember the last time we mopped the hardwood floors. It seems sensible to mop every now and then, and I'm assume there's no harm in adding a few drops of somethin-somethin.

You haven't convinced me not to get too excited. If I was buying right now, I think I'd buy the S5/S50.

However, my Mi is just fine and a little spray of silicone lubricant and she'll be good-as-new!

...I'm pretty tempted to test my trade in options tho!

alphastar: Hey there. I'm not seeing much out of the box with Google assistant and its erroring out right now. I'll tinker with it next week sometime.

It seems like there is potential discussed here; https://community.home-assistant.io/t/expose-vacuum-to-google-assistant/35182/17

There are indeed some Google Assistant commands that work with the Xiaomi vacuums, as per https://assistant.google.com/services/a/uid/00000059b6df25e0?hl=en-US

I tried some of them (start/stop the vacuum) and they worked fine; 'is the vacuum running?' command came back with the cleaner is paused, despite it running so something not quite right there.

TBH, I don't think voice commands will be really that useful until the app is sophisticated enough  to provide for permanent zones, and for this to be integrated with Google Assistant, eg  to respond to a command like 'vacuum the  lounge'.

I have an S50 and am very happy with it, the only thing that is annoying is having to empty the dust bin regularly.  However if I simply set the Vacuum to run every 3-4 days, then it does the whole house on a single empty.  If I leave it for 2-3 weeks, I have to pause and empty half way, so the i7+ does have an advantage here. My S50 is 1/3rd the price of the i7+, so not that much of a hassle though :-)

Very good comparison here... Roomba i7+ vs Roborock S50...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jde-79953hI

sonyxperiageek: That's one thing that I like about the Roomba I wish the Xiaomi had... The rubber rollers. They pick up all hair, but doesn't get tangled up!

Not according to the review in the link I posted above.

Although agreed, my S50 also picks up hair and gets stuck in the rollers, doesn't effect operation but have to get scissors to cut it out often. I could always ask my wife to cut her hair shorter lol.  But looks like both have this issue (and I would say the Roomba looks like it is more prone to this based on it's design)

Obraik:

 

I just picked up one of these yesterday, and so far it's amazing! I had always been interested in robot vacs but felt that it wasn't worth the hassle if I had to empty its bin - I wanted full automation or nothing. With the S9+ coming out recently I thought I'd stick it out and wait for that since it supposedly has better suction but after reading some of the reviews with people having a bunch of issues with it since this it's iRobot's first design update I figured I'd get the i7+ now and maybe pick up the replacement to the S9 in a few years.

 

Anyway, it feels really futuristic now setting my Roomba off to clean the house without having to worry about it. It'll trek around, returning to the base occasionally to empty itself or recharge before going out again and finishing the job. While the S9 has better suction, I can't say I'm disappointed with what my i7 is doing - out of curiosity I ran my Dyson over some spots that it had gone over and it didn't pick up anything extra that the Roomba had missed.

 

The only thing I wish iRobot would add in future generations is something that can detect pet messes so then I could use the scheduling feature while I'm away from home. My indoors only cat sometimes eats his food too fast or is just displeased in general with what he ate and vomit so I'd hate to come home to find the house painted with his creation. 

 

So I've had this for a month now and overall, it's been great. Our usual routine is feed the cat, give him an hour to figure out if he's going to vom or not and then set the Roomba (NooNoo) out to clean the house while I go about my business. There's only been two times where I've had to help it out, once when it climbed an oversized curtain and panicked and another it ingested an iPhone charger and couldn't free itself. Otherwise, it's basically set and forget.

One thing I hope iRobot improve on is making better use of the smarts in the i7 to make it more efficient time wise. There are some occasions where I've noticed it go back to empty its bin, head back to the other end of the house to pick up cleaning where it left off and then after a minute or two go back to its base to recharge because it's flat. I feel it would be more efficient in this instance to just sit and recharge if the battery is that low while emptying. Other times it'll go back to charge, sit on the charger until it's fully recharged (1.5 hours) and then go out and finish the last 2 minutes of cleaning to finish the job. Since it knows what it has and hasn't cleaned, it should only sit on the charger for as long as it needs to get enough charge to finish what's left to do. Ultimately it doesn't matter since it's all automated but there are times where it has a total job time of 4 hours including charging time and it could have actually finished the job 1 hour 20mins earlier if it didn't waste time charging more than it needed to.

I got Xiaomi Mi last week. Iver not had much time to play around with it yet however Ive had a few issues where it gets stuck or blocked. Each time the blockage is cleaned out the map resets. This is a bit frustrating as 80% of the room may have been cleaned. Is there a way to save the map and save the zones?

Sounds like you are doing something wrong. If it errors, when you fix the error, it should resume the clean.

kiwijunglist: If it has error eg. Brush blocked just push the on button and it will keep going where it left off.

I've gone as far to automate this.. 5 seconds after error state, it gets restarted. It's a fairly known issue.