Troubled robot vacuum-cleaner maker iRobot, abandoned by Amazon after regulators effectively doomed the web giant’s takeover offer, has warned investors it may not survive the next 12 months.
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Hmm so this entire trick of setting up companies just to be bought by mega corps appears to be not a viable strategy if anti trust law is enforced?
Edit: apparently this company was set up before sell to mega corp craze got kicked off. I don’t think changes the thesis but this case study doesn’t support it with the strength I suggested
Hmm as if last 30 years of corpo behavior has been essentially to maintain mega corp dominance via captured regulators and legislators
We got the capitalism alright but where is the free market at, daddy?
The market is “free” to fuck you and everyone you know on the ass.
Didn’t you know that’s what “free market“ means?
I do, in fact, dislike being fucked on the ass.
I like it, myself, but not when it’s a major global multi billion dollar corporation doing it.
The operative word here is consent haha
That is always the operative word. Except for those who don’t can’t and will never accept that that word exists.
Parasite class and their legal persons sure do have a rapist culture as their MO
It’s not capitalism without exploitation.
Don’t worry, the new strategy is to string a company along with talks of a buyout, then when their cash runs out and they declare bankruptcy, to buy all the assets on fire sale.
Owners of the take over target shoulda worked harder and maybe ate less avocado toast?
fire tablet, fire phone, fire sale!
'member the HP Touchpad? I 'member…
setting up companies just to be bought by mega corps
iRobot was originally founded all the way back in 1990 and have sold quite a lot of Roomba vacuums, advancing innovation in home automation along the way. I don’t think anyone can ever say that they set up this company for a quick flip corpo pump and dump.
It was originally at up to leech government funding for “weapons research”. I guess I’m old because nobody here seems to remember that.
What’s the context for this?
iRobot started off as a defense contractor making mine clearing algorithms or some such vaporware.
Hmm an interesting pivot
Well damn… How did they run the company into the ground?
Let me guess cheap Chinese robots sold on amazon?
Thank you providing additional context.
Honestly I think they suffer a little from early-mover disadvantage.
“Cheap Chinese” and all the associations that come with that is a little reductive in this case. Roborock vacuums are not actually cheap - they are extraordinarily well-made, featureful, and a good value compared to iRobot.
Decades ago, iRobot probably spent millions in R&D just to arrive at navigation algorithms that were worse than what you can get with open-source libraries today. They also spent the marketing dollars to convince people these robots were safe and effective. They weren’t always, so there were some ups and downs in that.
Nowadays the supporting technologies are all much more advanced (and cheaper) and the market for these robots has been created already and is very robust. Companies like Roborock just have to come in and build a good product and they’ll see much faster returns than iRobot did for all those years. They can go straight to lidar, which was probably prohibitive for iRobot for many years, leading iRobot to invest heavily in other technologies which are now a generation behind.
So in addition to their decades of tech legacy. iRobot is burdened with the expectations of longtime investors who want a big cashout, just as they are getting eaten alive by all this new competition. They pinned their hopes on a big exit and are now holding the bag. It’s not surprising that this all left them in trouble.
Thank you
oh its free alright. for oligarchs to do whatever the fuck they want.
You just gotta be big enough that you can buy enough people. FAANG is there (though this is Wild West politics nowadays so who the fuck knows what’s gonna happen). But when you own the people writing the laws to control you… they’re not controlling you.
So the Roomba I bought in 2021 is gonna stop working come 2026… Guess I need an open source vacuum now too 😩
Here you go https://valetudo.cloud/
Thank you stranger! This is great
🤛
It’s going to become feral
this comment makes me question, is there an open source sex toy community?
edit: there is lmao https://github.com/PITR-DEV/ukbutt-modBro … this is the best response I’ve ever gotten on Lemmy 🤣🤣🤣 thank you stranger, both fascinating and hilarious
Good news, buttplug.io is written in Rust so it’s safe.
Their products are like 5 years behind their competitors. It’s inevitable.
Slightly off topic but how are y’all at replacing the parts that get worn out?
I’m still on the 2nd filter it came with and I haven’t replaced any of the brushes, etc.,
I kind of wish I had a maintenance schedule where I just had the parts delivered and replaced them at set intervals rather than having to guess when it’s worn out.
But I also don’t want to overspend.
There are a million third party vendors that sell replacements on amazon, just take a look. Though - and I don’t know for sure having not actually read the article - it seems as though you may also need to change out the firmware so you can keep operating it if iRobot’s servers go down, since all the roombas i’m aware of need internet connectivity to operate.
If you’re at the point where you need to start replacing parts, it might be worth starting to look into other brands
My Roomba doesn’t connect to the Internet – I use the clean and dock buttons
If you’re using a roomba, the app will typically tell you when to replace your brushes and filter. The filter you can find easy replacements for as well as the little spinning brush. The bigger brushes are harder. You can buy replacements from third party vendors for cheap, but they’re not perfect… and if you have carpeting the roomba will freak out until the third party brushes wear down a bit. After that happens, everything mostly works.
I usually clean out the roomba every week and replace the brushes every 4 months or so. I run mine nightly though (I have kids).
I’m glad my old, non-smart one still works fine. It slams into things and says, “Roomba needs help” or something when it eats a sock or wire I missed. But at least it will outlast the company’s servers.
I’m just going to leave this here: https://github.com/awesome-vacuum/awesome-vacuum
Not trying to make this sound like nyah, nyah or anything…
But here’s where I’m glad I never got into that genre of “robotic” assistants. Happy to clean my floors by hand, thank you.
Wonder what kind of illumination this situation might be shining on the current “AI assistant” craze…?? 🤷♂️ 🤷♂️
Do you beat your clothes on a rock down by the river too?
I’ve got pets and just having the hair off the floors on a regular basis without having to spend 20 min a day hauling a vacuum around strikes me as being a nice labor savings. But I haven’t sprung for one yet.
If cost is the main issue, you can find a refurbished slightly older Eufy model on Amazon for $80, which I would consider well worth it. I have two dogs and I pull a large handful of hair out of my robo-vac every day.
I have cats, and two Eufys, one for each floor. I don’t run them every day since the cats are all shorthair and it takes a bit to add up, but it’s nice to just let it go for a bit and check in.
And do that. Don’t assume the vacuum is strong enough to suck things all the way in. They can easily be clogged the first run through and then you’re just pushing crap around. Should carry the lesson over to any automation. Trust to a certain level, but know what it can and cannot do and when to step in.
Have dog, considered same.
But, I live alone and don’t bother to vacuum everyday.
Haven’t yet found the cost/benefit to be worth it. 🤷♂️
My robo cleaner is just not connected to the internet… No app, no one can kill it remotely…
IMO, this thing was one of my best investments ever. Saved me days of time…
It would be great if more smart devices had a LAN-only control mode like my 3D printer, TV and AV receiver.
I would be perfectly happy if my iRobot phone app only worked from inside my network.
Doesn’t apply to iRobot but there are lots of robot vacuums that can be flashed with an open firmware with just a USB UART cable: https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/supported-robots.html
As for the other devices, my 3D printer, projector and AV receiver are all locally controlled.
Big +1 for Valetudo. I use it on a refurbished Roborock S7+ I got on eBay and it’s fantastic.
Make sure to read their disclaimers, they’re really not interested in expanding features, so make double sure it’s sufficient for what you want.
How was your experience rooting it?
I’ve been really wanting a Roborock for a while but I saw that changes starting on I think their S6 model made rooting it much more difficult and required a pretty extensive disassembly process.
I’m pretty comfortable with electronics teardowns but the thought of having to fully disassemble my brand new device to root it made me decide to wait a little and see how things shake out. I haven’t looked into it seriously for maybe a year or so though so I don’t know what has changed.
I rooted both of my Roborock S6.
If you can solder and have an UART USB cable, it’s not really hard to do. Technically you can flash it by just holding your UART adapter against the solder pads but soldering them on definitely makes it easier.
There’s a full video guide on how to dissassemble and root here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9PoaNtZCJRZc61c792VCr_I6jQK_IdSb
Firmware and everything else is here: https://builder.dontvacuum.me/_s6.html
Also, if you don’t have a Roborock yet, the Dreame models are significantly easier to root. Don’t even have to disassemble most of them.
Thank you. Funny enough it looks like I’ve already watched both of those videos last time I was looking into this. I’m comfortable soldering but it was yet another barrier to me actually making a purchase.
I’ll check out Dreame, I have not heard much about them.
I’ve had two Neato’s in the past and I really miss having one but I now live in a split-level house and the convenience factor drops down a lot when you have to carry it between floors all the time rather than just coming home to a freshly cleaned carpet.
I’ll check out Dreame, I have not heard much about them.
Roborock, Dreame and Xiaomi are functionally almost identical. Some of them even share the same parts.
If you want to root them, get a Dreame or a Xiaomi. Most of them are rootable without disassembly, see the list linked above.
Same experience as domi, had to take the whole thing apart. It was pretty straightforward as the guide was excellent. My only regret is forgetting to enable SSH access before reassembling it.
At that point, I wouldn’t trust ANY device that cannot be controlled locally, either natively or at least through some hacks.
Your 3d printer has a NIC?
It’s pretty common for newer 3D printers to have WiFi. Start/stop jobs, monitor cameras, or just to have a more capable UI than the built-in screen. Lots of people add this capability to older printers (or new ones with sucky interfaces) with OctoPrint.
I have an ender 3 and Im glad it doesn’t do any of that. So much more complicated
And some brands of 3D printers have started placing those functionalities behind remote servers and paywalls
cough cough Bambu Labs cough cough
BambuLab A1 Mini. It has a WNIC.
Hmm. Interesting.
My cheap Conga robot came with a remote controller. It stopped connecting to its server long ago, but I can still use it. The battery is getting worse and worse, though.
I think it’s just using MQTT, so block network access and use HomeAssistant
Their products require their app, would this effectively turn their devices useless when the servers die?
I know it supports a single button to start cleaning, but I wonder if that will work properly without being able to call home.
Might be time for people to look for alternatives.
Requires an app? As soon as Amazon bought it, mine has never again connected to an app or the internet.
It usually has a big start button on it’
You can root a lot of the earlier ones.
The alternatives are Chinese, or vacuum your own floors… Nobody wants to do that
I’ve got a Samsung that works just fine completely offline with no app. I don’t need some app to block it from going somewhere I just put some things in the way. Takes 3 minutes to prep for it driving around.
I assume this will brick all Roombas past the 800 series. All the scheduling, advanced mapping features etc are hosted on AWS. You’ll be able to press clean to start but that’s pretty much it… That’s unless they open up their software which they probably won’t
If it bricks my i7 room a I’ll just take it apart and make it work somehow. It will take a long time but worst case scenario it goes from a brick to a brick
Something happened when they moved to the vslam (i.e camera mapping) robots which made the software much harder to hack… you used to be able to use a serial cable to program them.
They used to encourage people to use a serial cable to program them. I remember when I got my Roomba nearly ten years ago, it came with a little pamphlet advertising their educational platform robot, which was basically a Roomba without the vacuum cleaning stuff. I think they intended it to be sort of the next step up from LEGO Mindstorm or something. But at the bottom of that pamphlet, there was a paragraph that basically said “hey you can get this educational robot, buuuut, the one you just bought has the exact same connections, firmware, and hardware 👀👀👀”
Works fine without the app.
Not if you want to schedule, edit the map, customize routines, etc
It’s still usable, it just reverts to the old school Roombas. Press clean to vacuum. Press dock to return to charger.
It technically still works without the app but it loses features that increase the efficiency of the map, tells it where not to clean, scheduled cleaning, etc.
So basically anything that makes it more useful than just doing it yourself.
Everything that makes it better than a generic copy, yes
That’s why I only bought the basic model – didn’t want a cloud company to have a map of my house lying around
Another company squandering their patents and market advantage. Reminds me of TiVo.
TiVo had such an excellent UI. DVRs became common, but all the ones I saw had such inferior interfaces. Such a shame.
I bought and hacked a TiVo unit and used it for years in a place where the service wasn’t available. I miss that thing.
This. I know someone who used to work there. They wouldn’t enforce the patents in China to the point where you could drop in Roomba subassemblies in competitor robots and they would still work…
I love my TiVo. I had to find someone to repair my current unit because it’s an antenna version. They don’t have/make new antenna versions.
https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/supported-robots.html
iRobot not even on the list despite being the original de facto vacuum robot OEM
Pretty much inevitable. Nowadays there are so many robot vacuum cleaners from different brands, and everyone has more or less figured out the tech so they all work pretty well. (I have a Roborock, and have nothing to say about it other than it keeps the floors clean and doesn’t cause me any grief.) There’s no moat, so consumer market success is purely a matter of manufacturing and cost efficiency, and iRobot obviously would have a huge upfill fight against Samsung, Xiaomi, and a thousand other light consumer goods makers.
I bought a roborock Q Revo the other week, and it works great at vacuuming and mopping.
I changed its spoken language to Chinese though, to remind me who I’m living with.
I thought this was a funny gag, until I changed my router and wifi, and then had to update the robots wifi connection with all the voice prompts in chinese
i bought a roomba 2 years ago. It wasnt the cheapest, but it was the only company that isnt some cheap, chinese knockoff brand. American designed and operated still had some advantages for me at the time.
This was before USA plunged into facism though. Now i’m not sure what i would buy.
I’m glad I waited to replace my old Eufy one. I definitely will not be replacing it with Roomba now.
So my vacuum will likely not work in 12 months. Niiiice.
Do you not see the logic of my plan?
Yes, but it just seems too heartless.
