Roomba 570 problems

I'll be the counter example then, to even the tally. :)

I bought a refurbed Roomba around Christmas and it's worked like a charm from the moment it turned it on. The only thing I have to watch for is one particular carpet with fringes that it likes to suck into the brushes, if I forget to pick up that carpet first. The worst that happens is that it gets stuck and beeps at me until I come clear it's throat and turn it loose again.

I guess the moral of the story is to only buy the refurbed ones, not the new ones. :)

I have five new ones I got from Outpost.com (spits in disgust!) and two have given me trouble. One had "the death spiral" (apparently a fair number do although mine was preceded by a rather abrupt drop when the bin detached from the unit during an "airlift" - they really need a better locking mechanism for it). In any event, it was exchanged promptly for new by Roomba. The other became very noisy after sucking down an overload of kitty litter but still works.

The "DirtDog" Roombas keep trying to shove more dirt in the tray when full so the dust begins to spill out into the machine's gizzards. The DirtDogs really need some sort of "full" sensor to shut them down or at least a transparent window on the dust bin - which I may cut into mine when the warranty is up. I haven't yet tried to thoroughly clean the kitty littered OD bot yet. I need to get some new canned air for that procedure.

Maybe I can cut a hole in the bin and adapt the whistle from whistling furnace filters to warn me when the Roomba is getting clogged up.

I found that the first few times I ran them, they filled up almost immediately because they were reaching so deep into the carpet to loosen dirt. Now, they really can go three cleanings without needing emptying.

Dan, if you're reading this, if HS becomes unwilling to pay shipping, consider contacting Roomba directly.

-- Bobby G.

| The "DirtDog" Roombas keep trying to shove more dirt in the tray when full | so the dust begins to spill out into the machine's gizzards. The DirtDogs | really need some sort of "full" sensor to shut them down or at least a | transparent window on the dust bin - which I may cut into mine when the | warranty is up.

I'm hoping for a version that empties itself at the dock.

| Dan, if you're reading this, if HS becomes unwilling to pay shipping, | consider contacting Roomba directly.

Have to be careful not to jeopardize Hammacher Schlemmer's lifetime guarantee...

Dan Lanciani ddl@danlan.*com

That's not a bad idea, but it would require a larger enclosure and a second vacuum motor for the charging station. It might be possible to mate the self-charging base with a central vacuum outlet and then cut a relay controlled port and flap in the dust bin so that upon docking, it would activate the central vacuum long enough to empty the bin. The problem with that is that an automatic brush cleaner would also be needed, and that's a chore that doesn't seem easy to automate. Maybe tiny bots could clean it the way remoras clean shark's teeth. (-:

I'd also like one that pauses and summons a human operators to say "I am about to sweep and suck up a big, steaming pile of dog doo into my innards - Proceed?" That scenario hasn't happened yet. Yet. Maybe I need a reconbot to sweep the area before I unleash the others.

I want a eco-friendly version that powers itself from micro-cold fusion of the grunge it sweeps up and then uses nanobots to root out all the yuck that gets caught in the rollers. I also want them to levitate to table height for inspection and to automatically activate when something spills - sort of like that famous classic animation feature of the automatic home with a cleaning robot that goes overboard in enthusiasm and comes out of its cupboard and cleans the ashtrays each time someone flicks an ash. I think it was a Max Fleischer cartoon but Google has failed me again - oddly enough, I see the same several hits even after some extreme changes to the query so someone's gamed their algorithm. Anyway, that old circa 1940 cartoon, the Jetsons and the 63 World's Fair all lead to my interest in home automation

I've got to talk to the other "fleet owners" to see how they manage their Roombas. The biggest issue lately is Roombas that get into a fatal confrontation with an errant sock or tissue under the bed. It's part of the reason I own more than one. I wait until at least two go MIA before I send out a reconn patrol.

I've been thinking of putting a tow rope on them and training the dogs to retrieve them when they start their "I can't get up!" beep tones. Seriously, though, I would suggest Roombas for the elderly except for the problems "herding" them. I had been thinking of building a rising platform to lift them up so my folks could use them but fate intervened. The need to more than occasionally crawl under the bed to haul stalled Roombas out makes them a bad buy for the brittle-boned, especially the way they resist extrication with their high-friction gnarled rubber tires.

With all the Roomba's smarts, it should be able to disengage the stuck rollers and motor to the brightest spot in the room and THEN cry for help. That should be a piece of cake for its binocular IR sensors. They'll get there someday. The current generation of Roombas has a lot more engineering "smarts" than the early versions.

P.S. Don't count on HS's lifetime being long. That sector of the economy is beginning its death spiral and the once "Sharper Image" is now the "Out-of-Focus Image."

The first thing SI did was to stop honoring their gift cards. I guess they want to make sure the don't emerge from bankruptcy with any loyal customers. Or emerge from it at all.

-- Bobby G.

The requirement for frequent manual brush cleaning is bothersome. I don't have to clean the brush on my real vacuum cleaner.

| I've got to talk to the other "fleet owners" to see how they manage their | Roombas.

The 5xx series doesn't seem amenable to fleet ownership because of the way RF pairing works. I'm wondering if they are going to rethink this for the next rev.

Dan Lanciani ddl@danlan.*com

So far, I've had two kamikaze bearings jump off into the trash can as I was untangling remnants of the dog's rope from the brushes. Bothersome, indeed. The newest Red Roomba 4300 replaces the smaller of the bristle brushes with a four flap rubber one and it seems more immune to tangling, but as you point out, it's a chore that's rarely required of a real vacuum cleaner and it's a fairly icky process. I've ordered some (outrageously expensive!) spare brushes so that I can swap them out and then batch clean a whole bunch at once but it really is problem they need to address.

They should. Lots of folks seem to run Roomba fleets. It's the only way to clean up the whole house in a reasonable amount of time. I wasn't aware the

5XX's use RF. I've been trying to teach my HomeVision controller some of the Rooma IR commands without much success but I haven't really spent a lot of time on the issue. I'd like to be able to issue a housewide "pause" command to the bots when the doorbell or phone rings. Eventually.

-- Bobby G.

I've got 2 robotic vacuums - a Roomba and a Karcher. The Karcher is 8 times the cost of the Roomba (because it has excactly what you asked for Dan - a self-emptying station, that sucks all the dust out of the vacuum and holds it in a dosposable bag concealed in the station). But that is DEFINITELY not worth 8 times the cost of the Roomba. I think my Karcher robotic vacuum is also obselete by now... it's about 4 years old.

My Roomba works flawlessly also, but i too have seen friends' Roombas fail... as mentioned, one suffered from the 'spiral of death' and another's stairs sensors stopped working (didn't go down stairs as gracefully as a slinky). You'd think iRobot would have tracked down these recurring problems and resolved them in the 570. But i can't personally complain, my Roomba has been fabulous, and picks up much more than my Karcher model.

I'm looking to add some more logic to my Home Automation system - running HAL and MyServant software

so that it will detect how much activity occurs in the living room and automatically sends the IR codes to kick off the Roomba whenever appropriate. I can't necessarily tell if someone's been sitting on the couch waving their hands for an hour, or people have been walking on the carpet for an hour, but it doesn't hurt to auto vacuum anyway.

G'day mate! It would be nice not to have to empty dust bins as often as I do. It would be even nicer not to have to untangle long hair, dog toy rope fibers and other detritus from the unit's rotating brushes. Those tasks are

*somewhat* offset by not having to drag out the vacuum hose or spend time vacuuming. Whenever I find myself futzing with the rollers and their easily lost little bearings, I often wonder if I am not spending as much time cleaning brushes as I would doing the vacuuming manually.

One of the reasons I've got five of them (4 DirtDogs and 1 4300 Red) is that no one tray gets so filled up it starts spewing dust into the internals, which seems to be the prelude for a number of sensor failures. Five Roombas clean up the house a lot faster and better than a single unit. I've also bought a case of dust spray and have developed a maintenance protocol that I perform once a month. It's a bitch, but it's cheaper than dealing with a home cleaning service and a lot more immediate. Having a number of Roombas makes the maintenance chore a little less of a bitch because the economies of scale kick in. So far, unlike my cleaning lady, the Roombas have never asked me for a loan or inflicted their family problems on me. (-: They also show up when they're supposed to and they are not likely to plug a vacuum into a UPS outlet or an X-10 lamp module.

They've admitted to having a bad batch of sensors that caused the "Death Spiral" problem and resolve those issues pretty quickly. To their credit, I can see just from the differences between the DirtDog and the Red 4300 that they are continually improving their design. I think a lot of the problems will disappear - eventually. I think that's one of the reasons they have been so reasonable in exchanging failed units: it gives their engineering staff good insight into what works and what doesn't. They must have been improving their manufacturing efficiency as well, because both the Red and the DirtDog can be had on sale at places like Fry's/Outpost for under $100 each.

From what I can tell, the main cause of sensor failure is dust occluding the sensor eyes. I've put a little dab of yellow paint next to all of them so that I remember to blow them out with the dust spray every month. As you might guess, the "drop off" sensors are the most important to keep clean lest the Roomba decide to clean the basement without being asked. However, blowing out the sensors once a month and making sure the bins never overflow seems to have a positive impact. I have not had any trouble with them since beginning my maintenance routine.

The DirtDog picks up a lot more dirt than any of my 110VAC vacuums except for the Hayden central vac with the 110VAC electrically powered brush. Since I've been running them every few days, the trays hardly ever overflow now. I think I will investigate their programming options because the I need to trim the length of the cleaning cycle, which is set for a single robot, to reflect my use of five of them. As it stands now, I am probably just wearing them out prematurely cleaning areas that have already been cleaned. For the moment, I close the doors between the rooms to keep them from cleaning previously cleaned areas.

The Red 4300 has a "dirt sensor" built in that detects when the Roomba is picking up dirt. Not a terribly useful feature since, as you point out, you want to know if there's dirt *before* the Roombas are dispatched. I have a slightly different interest in being able to monitor the Roomba remotely via HomeVision. I'm trying to figure out how I can detect the Roomba's "last known location" so that when it eats a Kleenex under the bed and dies, I know which bed to look under. I guess the next step is to locate a Roomba developer's forum, since I can't be the only one who has to send out a search party every now and then and locating MIA Roomba.

-- Bobby G.

FWIW, in reading up on your unit this weekend, it seems there is a tendency for hairs, especially long ones, to wrap themselves tightly around the brush and wheel shafts and trigger the motor stall sensors. I've had that happen with the drive wheel but it seems if the wheel turns freely, that's probably not the problem. It apparently takes very little torque difference in the two drive motors to make big turns.

If you put the unit on a table ledge so the cliff sensors sense "solid land," you can put a wheel in each palm and guesstimate the torque. When it starts up, it should alternate between wheels pretty forcefully in your hands. You have to keep the wheels pushed up into the body of the bot with your hands to keep it from shutting down.

talks about brush problems. Do you have two different size roller brushes and are they bristle or rubber paddlewheel style with four vanes? It seems that iRobot replaces bristle brushes with rubber flapped ones when owners complain. The Red 4300 comes with a small rubber roller and a larger bristle one.

One of the tests they had me run when mine began spiraling was to run the unit without any brushes at all.

I've gathered that a lot of problems surface in the first few runs of new ownership due to the typically high initial "dirt load" in the house. No matter how anyone vacuums, the Roomba will still outdo them, covering the same area many times and getting under beds and bureaus where it's really hard to vacuum. After these initial "deep grunge" runs, things settle down a bit if they haven't failed. It's an almost universal observation of Roomba and Scooba users that both get dirt that most other methods don't. New users in the iRobot forums are encouraged to manually clean the best they can and then to see how much more dirt the Roomba finds.

Let us know what happens.

I've built a fairly primitive but useful small brush cleaner by cutting radial slits in a plastic milk bottle cap. When you push the brush back and forth through the gores they spread apart and the tips dig into the dirt and a lot of it falls into the bottle below. Great for scraping off all the hair and grunge, but strong threads wrapped around multiple times still have to be cut with the Roomba letter opener tool. Still, the less roller I touch with my hands, the happier I am. I have a repair ticket in with them now and I'll ask them if the rubber paddle wheel brush is going to replace the small bristle brush on future models or just the vacuum type bots.

Tonight's project is to mount rechargeable NiMH batteries in the Roomba Virtual Fence and build a base station that recharges it when I am finished using it.

-- Bobby G.

I removed the wheel module; there was no obvious mechanical problem.

| If you put the unit on a table ledge so the cliff sensors sense "solid | land," you can put a wheel in each palm and guesstimate the torque.

I did quite a bit of that. When it wanted to turn the wheel forward it managed to tense it up a bit but nothing more. Backwards worked. I tried controlling it with the remote as well. My first guess would be that part of the driver circuit had failed.

|

| &view=by_date_ascending&page=2 | | talks about brush problems. Do you have two different size roller brushes | and are they bristle or rubber paddlewheel style with four vanes?

One brush, one rubber paddle wheel

| It seems | that iRobot replaces bristle brushes with rubber flapped ones when owners | complain.

Apparently they replace the entire brush module quite a bit, but I don't think it would have helped in this case. The motor wasn't even trying to turn. I suppose it could have burned out, but again it felt like a driver failure.

| I've gathered that a lot of problems surface in the first few runs of new | ownership due to the typically high initial "dirt load" in the house.

I would have hoped that all the drivers were protected against even complete motor stalls.

| Let us know what happens.

I have unit #3. I haven't run it much yet; I'm sort of afraid to. If things don't settle down after six months (when the free shipping stops) I'll probably give up...

Dan Lanciani ddl@danlan.*com

(My spell checker decided to rename your vendor and it was too funny to correct.)

It worked for about an hour total and then

I suspected it wasn't your problem, but it afflicts a lot of people, and may yet bother you. The next place I would look would be a bad connector but you're ahead of me in the disassembly process so it's just a hunch. One would think that the boards are either Go/No Go and the failure point is likely to be the assembly or shipping process. Especially for two in a row. Something not getting connected properly or banged loose during shipping.

Do you think the individual units are tested during or after assembly or QC is by random pulls?

| &view=by_date_ascending&page=2

You've not even experienced the joy of the small bristle brush and how much rug fringe it can eat. (-: They're obviously learning. Can you return it and get a few 4300's? I recently saw them for $89 at Outpost (ptooey!). I am convinced people should get the very latest and greatest from Roomba because of all the "slipstream" changes to firmware and hardware. They've made some serious advances in the ability to decelerate before colliding with an antique table leg and knocking a chip out of it. )-: (very low SAF!) They've also made changes in edge navigation - the DirtDogs get stuck on the mat in front of the dog bed religiously but the Red 4300 does not. They look very similar drivetrain-wise so I assume the difference is in the processing of sensor data from the wheels.

Having recently traced a bizarre intermittent in a PC to a bad crimp in a Molex drive cable power splitter, I'm now hitting all problems I encounter with my "it's a bad connector" hammer.

They seem to be. I perhaps should abuse the one I am about to send back to see what happens when wheels are clamped and can't spin.

Too bad. I would have suggested the fleet paradigm, for reasons stated previously and for the spare parts. I figure for every four I buy, I'll effectively getting six because I should be able to repair two for close to nothing - unless, of course, it's always the same part that fails. It's also pretty amazing just how fast five bots can clean up a house, especially with a human bot herder following them around with a cooking pot brush attached to a long stick to root out corner dirt, the Roomba's Achilles' heel. What I really need now is a cornerbot that seeks out wall convergences and has a specially designed proboscis for cleaning inside corners.

From what I've been reading lately, I think they're experiencing lots of failures. It's taking them a long time to respond to my email - well over four days now and that wasn't true of the first one I sent back. If it's not more failures, it's a smaller support staff and either one is not a good sign.

-- Bobby G.

| Do you think the individual units are tested during or after assembly or QC | is by random pulls?

I'm not sure it would make any difference. Remember, both units ran fine for about an hour.

| You've not even experienced the joy of the small bristle brush and how much | rug fringe it can eat. (-: They're obviously learning. Can you return it | and get a few 4300's? I recently saw them for $89 at Outpost (ptooey!). I | am convinced people should get the very latest and greatest from Roomba | because of all the "slipstream" changes to firmware and hardware.

I thought the 500 series *was* the latest and greatest. Does the 4300 have the pseudo-ZigBee radio so it can talk to the lighthouses?

Dan Lanciani ddl@danlan.*com

"Dan Lanciani" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@news1.IPSWITCHS.CMM...

ROBERT snipped-for-privacy@YAH00.COM (Robert Green) writes:

No, but none of them failed within an hour either. One of the reason I've had trouble figuring out which model was the latest and greatest is the sheer number of them, including different models that share the same number. Based on this list cribbed from Wikipedia your unit was introduced after my

4300 was made, so it's probably a good assumption that you're right and it is a later design:

First Generation (1G) Roomba (2002, improved in 2003, discontinued) Roomba Pro (2003, discontinued) Roomba Pro Elite, model # 3100, (2003, discontinued) The first-generation Roombas have three buttons for room size.

Roomba DiscoverySecond Generation (2G) (All 2G Roombas can be updated to

2.1G Roombas) Dirt Dog, model # 1100 (Budget model, sweeper only no internal vacuum) (September 2006)[1] Roomba, model # 4000, now model # 400 (2006)[2] Roomba Red, model # 4100, now model # 410 (2004, improved to 2.1G in 2005) [3] Roomba Sage, model # 4105, now model # 416 (2004, improved to 2.1G in 2005) [4] Roomba Sage, model # 4110, now model # 416 (identical to # 4105, but includes charging base) Roomba Clean Blue, model # 4130, (HSN exclusive model, earliest release of 2.1G Roomba at a special preview price, identical to the 2.1G Sage except for color.(2004, discontinued) Roomba Clean Blue, model # 4130, (HSN exclusive model, earliest release of 2.1G Roomba at a special preview price, identical to the 2.1G Discovery except for color) (2004, discontinued)(Although confusing it should be noted both HSN models share the same model number (4130) despite being two very different models.) [5] Roomba Silver, model # 4150, (Amazon.com & Target exclusive model, identical to # 4105, except for a special silver finish) Roomba Sage for Pets, model # 4170 (2006) [6] Roomba Pink Ribbon Edition, model # 4188, (Identical to # 4105 except for color with 20% of the sale price was donated to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation) (2005, discontinued) Roomba Discovery, model # 4210, (2004, improved to 2.1G in 2005)[7] Roomba Discovery SE, model # 4220, (2004, identical to Discovery 4210 but with different paint and self-charging wall mount; improved to 2.1G in 2005, discontinued) Roomba Scheduler, model # 4225, (same as 4230, but sold at Costco) Roomba Scheduler, model # 4230, (2005) [8] Roomba Scheduler, model # 4260, with Intelli-Bin (auto detection of a full refuse bin) (Sold at Hammacher-Schlemmer) Roomba Discovery for Pets (2006)[9] Roomba Scheduler with Intelli-Bin (July 2006)[10] The second-generation Roombas (dubbed "Discovery") replaced their predecessors in July of 2004, adding a larger dust bin, better software that calculates room sizes, fast charging in the home base (or wall hanger in the Discovery SE), and dirt detection. All second-generation Roombas are functionally identical, though some have more or fewer buttons, accessories, or casings, and all featured updated programming after mid 2005. The low-end models continue to be available as of 2007 with new model names.

Third Generation Roomba 510, 530, 535 (HSN Version),

550 (Costco Version)[11], 560, 570, and 580 (August 2007)[1] The third-generation 5xx Roomba was introduced in 2007 and features an infrared sensor to detect obstacles, a dock button, and improved mechanical components. Some second-generation models remain on sale, however, as the 4xx series.

The list is obviously not complete since it doesn't list my Red 4300 Roomba with a manufacture date of July 07 (the date's embedded in the barcode starting at position 9). This is the unit that has the improved algorithm that doesn't get hung up on dog mat and communicates via IR. The biggest change in SW seems to be something they've labelled 2.1G and the above article seems to imply that the Dirtdog has it as well, but that doesn't explain why four DirtDogs get hung up in the same place but the 4300 doesn't. Does your unit have "Intellibin" to warn you that the dust bin is full?

My guess would be that they're in the "reduce production cost" mode and may have cut back on component quality or changed to a new Chinese supplier for motors or boards that's using melamine, lead and contaminated Heparin in the manufacturing process.

-- Bobby G.

| The third-generation 5xx Roomba was introduced in 2007 and features an | infrared sensor to detect obstacles, a dock button, and improved mechanical | components. [...] | Does your unit have "Intellibin" to warn you that the dust bin is | full?

I see no obvious sensor that would tell it. The manual, of course, is no help at all.

| My guess would be that they're in the "reduce production cost" mode

That would be my guess as well. If what I'm seeing are "improved mechanical components" the original versions must have been horrible (or better and expensive, depending on who is supposed to benefit from the "improvement").

Dan Lanciani ddl@danlan.*com

I guess I'll have to look around on the net for information. A "bin full" sensor would be a lot more useful than the current LED that lights up when the unit passes over dirt. Yawn.

"improvement").

They're letting me keep my defective Roomba although the replacement will have no brushes, batteries or anything else. That means I can get into the guts of the broken one without worrying about voiding the warranty. I think dust blew into the brush drive train, and if that's true, I want to see if there's anything I can do to clean it out. If is was dust, I also want to further dust proof the mechanicals since the warranties for the rest of the dogpack will be expiring in a few months. Probably just taping the seams with black electrical tape will provide greater protection. Even with the problems, I'm still satisfied. They handled the repairs and exchanges better than most and the SAF in general is pretty high because with pets, it's hard to keep the house free of debris but the Roombas seem to do the trick. They're especially really useful to control tracked in wet leaves in the fall.

One thing I find interesting is that the vacuum-less DirtDog seems to pick up about the same amount of dirt as the models with vacuum cleaning and there's less cleaning to do since it has no filters. I based that on the standard "run one after the other" test and the 2nd run with Red 4300 really doesn't pick up very much more dirt. I think the DirtDog's small bristle brush is more efficient than the rubber impeller brush. The tradeoff is that the bristle brush is harder to keep clean. The brush difference may also explain why the Red doesn't stall on the dog mat, now that I think about it. I can drop the rubber brush into the Dirtdog to see if the DirtDog still stalls where the Red doesn't.

-- Bobby G.

I couldn't find anything about how they implement the "bin full" sensor and I really looked because it's such a problem. Here's one comment of several that might put a damper on doing the mod:

It could be that the "dirt found" sensor does have a purpose and the firmware sums up all the "dirt found" hits and compares it to some constant they derived through testing to generate a "probable" bin full signal.

"improvement").

I think it's pretty typical, actually. The relatively dependable Red 4300 and DirtDogs looks to be the very last of the 2G series whereas the 570 is probably the first of more than a dozen new models. If I understand modern marketing, you're part of a customer-funded beta test. Oh brave pioneer we salute the many arrows in your back! (-: Today, I noticed my favorite pudding cups now had a big indentation at the bottom of the cup. I wonder how many $ $ $ they save taking a 1/8 ounce of pudding from 100,000's of them? iRobot is probably going to benefit from the improvements more than you or I.

-- Bobby G.