They admittedly aren't perfect, but Consumer Reports is the only one I remotely trust. So many "review sites" basically just look at the highest rated items on Amazon and create an article out of it. I needed a new beard trimmer recently and it was just page after page of spam.
Amazon reviews are so manipulated they're nearly useless now. Reddit isn't too bad, at least for the most part they are real people.
Wirecutter is pretty good in my experience. I have the same caveat as for Consumer Reports--you're probably not the audience if you have a lot of experience with and definite opinions about a category--but I've had good luck with them overall.
I don't always agree with their conclusions, but I can't argue with Wirecutter's methodology; their write-ups are well researched, documented, and overall fairly exhaustive in detail.
Indeed, often the needs of the experienced person are quite different from the needs of the “tyro”. So even though I often disagree with consumer reports on, say, laptops, the very reasons I disagree made me confident when buying a toaster oven or glucose meter.
Check out Tech Gear Lab and Outdoor Gear Lab. They’re based in Tahoe and the company purchases every single item they test. When they’re done with testing, they often put the gear up for raffles locally to support mountain bike trails and outdoor non-profits. The folks who run it are all really great people.
Fwiw about a year ago I got the Peanut, a professional plug-in trimmer that costs $45. It works way better than any battery-powered trimmer I've tried.
Only drawback is that you change the length by replacing the guard instead of just sliding it to a different position; one day I didn't notice the guard was off and with one swipe it was too late to salvage my beard. I removed the rest and started over; luckily I keep it short anyway.
Corded products are underrated. It's a hassle to deal with the cord, but it's worth it when not needing to worry about if the battery is charged when you start, the battery running out mid-task, or plugging in the battery to charge after and remembering to unplug it later.
The issue with the cord can be greatly improved by having a nice retractible extension cord. Easy to take out, easy to put back, easy to move, easy to store.
I did the same thing maybe 7 years ago and the peanut still just works. I got tired of needing to buy replaceable blades or forgetting to charge it or the unreplaceable batteries just crapping out. I don't even keep a beard. I just use the peanut without a blade guard and it cuts close enough for me. No razor burn or pulled hairs ever.
Check out Fakespot.com. you plug in an Amazon URL and the site will analyze the reviews/reviewers and give the product trustworthiness score and an adjusted 5 star rating.
I've had pretty good results with this. I started using it after I bought a couple of VERY highly rated books that were just unreadably bad. I checked them on FakeSpot and they all had abysmal ratings when the fake reviews were removed.
It's only a matter of time before bots that automatically write somewhat convincing comments and post threads start hitting reddit, if they haven't already.
A lot of review manipulation, especially the more effective manipulation, is done by humans. The reason it doesn't happen as much elsewhere is because it those are very low ROI compared to manipulating directly in the list of search results.
Hi Syntaxing
I'm the owner of myrobotmower.com
Although not a hands on, I wrote this article due to the significance of the announcement.
As a robot lawnmower enthusiast for 20 years, the imminent arrival of robot mowers without perimeter wire is a paradigm shift in the industry.
I'm actively involved with a number of companies developing competing products.
I have hands on experience with most of the current robot mowers on the market, and robot mowers like the irobot terra are going to make a big impact when they launch.
I wish I had more info for the article that I can publicly share.
Best wishes
Andrew
Get one of the mowers that follows a wire and then embed the wire under the grass in the pattern you want.
I remember seeing one of these where a guy would mow outside a pattern at one height, then adjust the height of the mower and mow the inside of the pattern so the grass was longer, giving him a noticeable pattern. Can't find a link at the moment though.
No. I often mow my lawn in a pattern to produce nice stripes. It's also commonly done on sports stadium grass. A pattern (if chosen for efficiency) can actually reduce the wear of riding/pushing a lawn mower over the grass by minimizing the number of passes needed over a given patch of grass.
> The iRobot Terra will use a series of wireless beacons that you place around your yard instead of a perimeter wire. These will provide a wireless, localized positioning signal to allow the iRobot Terra to find it’s way around your lawn.
What happens when the beacons run out of battery power?
The biggest fear I have with a robot lawnmower is that it somehow escapes its boundary and wanders the neighborhood and injures a person or pet with its spinning blade. And it's pointless to have one if you have to supervise it to safeguard against rare faults in its boundary detection system.
If enough beacons have died such that it can no longer calculate it's position I bet it just stops. Should be a fairly easy thing to check just stop, send a notification, and power off or more likely since beacons are far more likely to die between runs just don't start if enough beacons aren't present.
That's my concern about their home vacuum cleaners as well: if a battery runs out, it would hit my computer. There are some programmable models though (were not available here at the time), and various certainly programmable DIY ones (may be a fun project, but would take some time); that seems like a much better solution -- both for efficiency and predictability (as opposed to random walk), and for this particular case with paths/boundaries (define them once in the robot's memory, maybe even just by moving it manually or otherwise showing it the path/boundaries, and don't rely on batteries in external devices).
> if a battery runs out, it would hit my computer.
So? It's a vacuum, you could drive it right in to a computer non-stop until the battery runs out and it's not going to do any meaningful damage. The worst case scenario would be if you had a case where the power or reset button was right there at vacuum height, but other than that what's your concern?
You'd be surprised. I have a Botvac and that thing can easily damage plenty of things in my house.
On that note, I love my Botvac. My biggest complaint though is that it has to "learn" a room first, without any sort of helping functionality. This is a problem in my eyes because the Botvac comes with an awesome in-app barrier system where you can tell it to avoid areas, but to tell it to avoid areas it has to have done a normal scan of that area.
It's a chicken-egg scenario. I can't keep the botvac out of my fragile areas without first letting it in my fragile areas.
Once scanned though, the Botvac's "no go" lines are awesome, and very accurate in my experience.
> you could drive it right in to a computer non-stop until the battery runs out and it's not going to do any meaningful damage
What is this based on (i.e., are HDDs and all the smaller components commonly designed to withstand such shocks)?
Now I've looked up a random WD Blue HDD data sheet [1], which mentions 30G shock (read/write, 2 ms). If a vacuum cleaner was to hit it directly while moving at about 1 m/s (less than 4 km/h, and it seems to walk at around that speed, though I haven't found exact values), and assuming that it would accelerate the HDD to its own speed in those 2 ms (maybe it's not realistic, though not obvious to me), that'd be about 50G (1 m/s / 0.002 s / 9.8). Even if it is so, a vacuum cleaner has a plastic bumper, a computer case is heavy, and a vacuum won't hit any of those components directly, but it seems dangerously close and I'd rather not hit the computer.
> accelerate the HDD to its own speed in those 2 ms (maybe it's not realistic, though not obvious to me)
You need to conserve the momentum and kinetic energy, so assuming an elastic collision you're going to accelerate the PC to about half the speed of roomba[1] so you're looking at closer to 25G. With the plastic bumper, you're not getting anywhere near an elastic collision and your contact time is probably a lot longer than .002 due to the deflection. I would not worry too much about this.
Three things you should keep in mind regarding those numbers:
1. They're worst case numbers, as in the hard drive being mounted perpendicular to the impact force. Some OEM crapbox PCs may have spinning rust mounted to the front of the case directly in a vertical orientation, but most PCs have them mounted horizontally and many use shock absorbing rubber bushings.
2. As noted, your numbers also assume an inelastic collision. Almost all PC cases have a plastic front, and all robo-vacs I'm aware of have the same.
3. The absolute peak potential impact force is significantly less than a single accidental kick or kid/pet running in to it.
If you're really concerned about impact, you should get your PC off the floor. That said, I'd happily frisbee a Roomba at my PC and not be concerned for anything other than the front panel of the case itself.
I have one of the random Roombas. The virtual walls are nice for keeping the robot out of areas where it will get stuck, but I rely on making small modifications to the environment to protect things from damage.
In the case of a computer, you could try putting it on a short platform (no more than an inch high is sufficient) or positioning it so cables are in spaces narrower than the robot can access. The latter is what I do. The back of the case is a few inches from a wall, and the cables are routed upwards into cable guides mounted under the desk. I mostly did that for aesthetics rather than the Roomba, though.
I have a few areas where ours gets stuck - I haven't tried it yet, but I was thinking cheap pool noodles would work. Definitely cheaper than beacons at $50 a pop.
Usually easier to slightly raise/lower your furniture.
A surprising amount of furniture already comes with levelers (1) that no one ever adjusts. Raise them up 1/4" and it can then pass under. If not, tacking on some small furniture glides are usually enough (2).
These have the advantage of allowing it to clean under the furniture as well. Every time ours got stuck I'd adjust the height a bit and haven't had a problem in over a year.
We can do that some places where it's an issue (bed, for example) but other places like cabinets that's not possible. The house I'm in now has foundation issues (it's a lease), so in spots it won't get under the cabinets, but a couple of feet down it gets wedged in as the height varies by a few millimeters.
> The house I'm in now has foundation issues (it's a lease), so in spots it won't get under the cabinets, but a couple of feet down it gets wedged in as the height varies by a few millimeters.
You might want to take a look at these. I've found them very useful for situations like that:
Our Roomba loves to get stuck under certain pieces of furniture and the low overhangs of our kitchen and bathroom cabinets. It just wedges itself in place and gets jammed, eventually erroring out.
If it doesn't do that, then the other annoying thing it sometimes does is drive off into a bedroom and go underneath our king-size bed, then "dies" (runs out of battery) somewhere in the middle of the bed area, which makes it very difficult to coax out. Neither my arms nor my wife's are long enough to reach it; I generally have to use a broom handle or such to shove it closer to one side to pull it out.
Eufy (part of Anker) is the same. Our entryway is about 1/2" lower than the rest of the house. Small enough for it to fall in without triggering the edge sensor, too tall for it to get back out.
I have a Roborock (Xiaomi) S50 which just has a LiDAR on top and I can set boundaries based on an actual map of my house with the app. Greatly preferable over having to place random things around the house.
I have the xiaomi one with lidar that actually maps the room and vacuums in laps. If it detects something in the way it slows down and lightly taps it, then it turns around. It never hits anything full speed. If you disconnect the dock the vacuum will keep working, but when it is finished it will go looking for the dock then tell you it's lost.
And you will 100% be reliable instead of the company. This is my fear with fully autonomous cars too. If the car has an error can injures someone, their huge team of lawyers and lobbyists will likely pin the blame on you somehow.
Well if you assume a full automonous car is as safe a driver (on average) as a 16 year old male that liability you are worried about can be (will be legislatively required to be?) insured away for a few hundred dollars a month.
The insurance market for lawnmower liability admittedly isn't as well developed.
Interesting, so double insurance. One for you and one for your car, genius! Maybe somebody at Progressive, Allstate, or Geico will see this and get a promotion, lol.
What happens when the beacons run out of battery power?
FWIW, the indoor beacons for its Roomba machines last a very long time. Mine go four to six months on a pair of AA batteries. Since these new ones are for outside, I hope they have larger batteries and last even longer.
I actually have a few cows of different colours coming to my patch to do the mower. My review of them is that they do the job and so far no residue. Just wonder in the old days there is a buffalo. May be my opening is too small for him or is it her (got horns though). Just to ensure they do not sit down as settle down in front of my house is not a good development for my places.
Has anyone had decent results with these mowers (any brand)? I'm in the process of building a house that's going to have a pretty simple yard and I've considering picking one of these up.
They are also substantially more expensive than the typical electric mowers you push yourself but if it saves x hours per week/month could be worth it. I just don't want to end up with an expensive paperweight and end up having to buy another mower anyways.
Used to own robo-vacuum cleaners of many brands, eventually sold them all, as each of them caused more work than they were supposed to spare me. After that I was reluctant to get a robomower but it is worth it.
Pros:
- you have to buy machinery anyways (if you're new to having a yard)
- less noise
- it will get mowed more often
- more mows -> healthier lawn
Setup cons:
- you have to bury/hammer a wire into the ground surrounding the area to-be-mowed
- you may have to expand/change your wifi-setup because mower/base-station need access as well
- like with robomowers, decoration is an obstacle. It will either get destoryed or destroy the bot
- because of this, need to have less decoration or need to surround them by wires as well
Recurrent cons:
- obstacles hit can (and will) cause blades to break free
- bc of this I have to replace the blades every 2-3 months (the only real maintenance to be done)
- at least try to find the lost blades (unless you're ok with guests/kids stepping into some unexpected, dirty, rusty, crooked blade
Exactly why I'm hesitant. The robo-vacuums have been highly disappointing and do a much worse job than taking the few moments to vacuum myself. I still have one that I run constantly because it's slightly better than nothing on a daily basis.
These cons don't seem terrible. Maybe in a few months we'll see some new ones on the market and see prices a bit more competitive. Appreciate all the input.
I had periodically thought about getting a robovac but:
- They're expensive, especially the high-end ones.
- They'd only do a portion of the house, albeit the part that gets the most traffic
- However, it's also the portion of the house that tends to have a pile or two of stuff that's being prepared for a trip or has just come back from a trip, various cords here and there, etc.
In the end, I ended up just getting a cordless vac that I can pull out in a few seconds if some vacuuming is needed. (I have a housekeeper who comes every month or so, so it's mostly about doing some light touchup between full cleanings.)
Found the exact opposite, although I was living in a carpeted flat when I bought mine. Vacuuming turned from something I'd have to put aside an afternoon for to something that just sorts itself out.
I used to design and build these - if you have a simple yard, you can use the inexpensive mowers, as long as you don't care about having striping in your lawn. I had one for two seasons, and it was awesome - your lawn looks like it freezes in time and is healthier to boot.
You just have to install an "invisible fence" style wire around the perimeter.
We have a small yard and a Landdroid mower we got 3 years ago. The yard is probably 1000sf It works quite well, though set up involves a perimieter wire which was a pain.
A critter eat through the wire this year, which means the mower stoped working. Figuring it out is was a perimeter wire break and where was a little tricky and involved using an am radio. Generally happy with the device.
Same problem here! Squirrels have gnawed through my perimeter wire dozens of times. I have the Husqvarna Automower 450x, which allows for three shortcut home wires.
Repairing the broken wire is easy...finding the break, however, is extremely difficult and time consuming. I've had the mower for 2 years and it's been awesome in every other way. I'm thinking of pulling up my entire perimeter wire and installing a new wire deeper. No doubt this will make finding future breaks more difficult, but I hope that by being deeper, the squirrel problem will go away.
Those squirrels....I found the break by turning the base on and using an AM radio to follow the wire around (it made a kinda tone). When the tone stopped I found the break. The hardest part was finding the radio And getting the batteries... I would assume it would work for the husqvarna perimeter too.
Man look at that little critter fly!! I think the principles for using an AM radio are sound. I found two radios, and used them, but I couldn't quite make sense of what I was hearing. Perhaps there was a ton of localized interference. I stepped up my approach by purchasing an underground wire locator from Amazon. This gizmo sends an amplified steady signal down the perimeter wire and a separate portable device listens for the signal as I walk along the perimeter. This didn't work as easily as I'd hoped. My guess is that due to the existence of one very large perimeter wire and three intersecting shortcut-to-home wires, there's some interference/signal degradation that complicates finding the break, especially since there's normally multiple breaks due to the relatively large population of squirrels. There's got to be an easier way to find a break! I think the conclusion here is that I should just keep a bunch of loaded bird feeders to occupy their time!
I look at it this way, if it is a waste of time to mow it then you have too much of it. I have nearly 12k sq feet and I still push mow it. Using an electric mower I find the time both relaxing and I can always use the exercise. plus I use the time to see what I need to fix, tweak, or just change out.
It's probably less even than a gas mower, but doesn't especially bother me, my lawn isn't a golf green. I've found the real key point is not to let grass get too long between mowing - I have to cut the grass every 3-4 days in peak grass season.
It takes me an hour to mow my lawn. Sometimes I can go a month without cutting it, sometimes I have to cut it every 3 days. Depends on the season, amount of rain, etc.
I spend more time doing other crap like weeding, fertilizing, trimming, picking up sticks, etc
The benefit of the robot that cuts it all the time is a healthier lawn with fewer slugs, dandelions, ticks and other pests. I cut once a week but it only really looks good the first day or two after cutting. And it’s full of slugs and weeds most of the season. So the robot isn’t really just doing the job you do yourself (weekend cut when it’s too long), it’s maintaining it in a way that’s hard to do manually.
Depends on your climate. In the PNW for example you don't have to water really so having a nice lawn isn't an ecological disaster that the article would make out.
Watering, weeding and fertilizing is not the only problems -- there is also intentional lack of biodiversity. Plants native to the area will always support more.
Yep, people should use local grasses and clovers. I've let the clover here take over my back yard and it's been wonderful with attracting bees - plus I don't have to mow it very often.
That was all based on a "green" news article being recycled on gizmodo. The original article was full of incorrect interpretations of data and so forth. E.g. lawns are not, contrary to the original article, the #1 crop by area.
Lawns in general are green by being carbon sinks. But as with all things, it depends. If you live in the midwest with plenty of summer rain, the lawn costs very little. If you're in Arizona or California, water use is an issue.
Not an option. There is an association and this a new development. I'm just looking to for the most affordable and hands free maintenance aside from hiring out a company to do it which I still might do.
It’s a good call for iRobot to skip GPS. You can get 1-2cm precision. But not always and it can be hard to tell when you are off. Plus the equipment is still not inexpensive in a consumer product context.
I think if I were to do it over (my lawnmower startup blew up) I’d do something like this and just drive the beacon cost down as much as possible. I had looked at using the DW1000 but the rest of the team wanted something beaconless for commercial applications.
I'm not a fan of beacons. If I built this for myself I'd probably stick a calibrated camera or two somewhere and use that for localization. Some day...
They mention GPS is not accurate enough and thus different solution is needed.
Could you do local differential-GPS solution? Put the ”base station” to charging base (which likely remains static) and transmit the correction information over wifi or using some unlicensed frequency.
You really want a carrier-phase-tracking L1+L2 receiver on each end for that sort of usage which isn't inexpensive (yet).
The beacons also could be adopted by future indoor projects of theirs... that would be really nice. My roomba gets lost easily when it starts getting dark out.
It could work and that plus an IMU is what we were doing at my now recently defunct lawnmower startup. For us to have the precision we needed we had about a 3500$ setup to do so.
Not really, we were using an IMU with a magnetometer and it was reasonably stable when it was setup correctly. As well as calibrated well. That with the GPS made things stable enough that it was at least a very good demo.
This is pretty neat; I had the impression that they were going to make something like this, but kinda put it out of my mind after hearing nothing about it for years.
I found an old Friendly Robotics lawn mower robot on Craigslist and purchased it for $50, thinking of using it for my lawn but I never got around to doing anything with it. Mainly because I couldn't think of an easy way to detect the perimeter of the lawn without an edge wire!
I guess it's not an easy problem to solve.
I had considered a bunch of options, a few of the ideas I had were:
1. Some kind of camera or color sensor, looking downward, to detect "green" vs "non-green" - assuming the grass was green and non-grass would be some other color. That would work ok for most of my yard, but my lawn in front doesn't have an "edge" with the neighbor's lawn - so it would mow their lawn, too - not what I want.
2. A passive perimeter, consisting of a bunch of spaced (maybe 6" between?) magnets - I thought maybe plastic golf tees with a rare-earth magnet glued on top would be ok; then use hall-effect sensors on the robot's perimeter to determine if it had crossed over the line of magnets.
3. This one was more to detect cut vs uncut grass - but use some kind of humidity sensor; assuming cut grass has higher humidity than uncut grass, "sniff" the ground and avoid uncut (drier) areas. The problem with this concept, mainly, was in not being able to find high-speed humidity sensors/detectors.
At any rate, I never followed through with any of this, but maybe someday I might return to it? I am curious on the cost of this iRobot lawn mower, though. I'm guessing 4 figures, given what I know about the price of their vacuums (which my wife loves; every time one dies, she buys a new one, and the old one I save for my future Roomba army to take over the world with).
If my guess is accurate, then I'll just have to put off buying one, as it will still be cheaper to continue to pay my landscaper to cut my lawn (and this robot won't trim trees or bushes yet, so...)
I fail to understand how a combination of GPS and Machine vision could not overcome the need for a dedicated telemetry system.
I mean yeah if you don't want to build a machine vision system to handle this I guess.... But my John Deere hardware has GPS support for crops and the accuracy is pretty damn spot on.
> But my John Deere hardware has GPS support for crops and the accuracy is pretty damn spot on.
To get that level of accuracy they're using differential GPS where another fairly expensive device is placed at a known location and transmits a signal indicating the amount and direction of the error in the signal received from the satellites. The receiver on the tractor then uses this information to correct the signal and get much greater accuracy than would otherwise be available.
This is not available in consumer-grade receivers.
>This is not available in consumer-grade receivers.
not true. i posted a link in a sibling comment but you can use two piksis with one as the base and one as the rover to get sub cm differential rtk. you can also use NOAA CORS station (if you're within 10km) to get precise ppk
for this use case i would set the base down at a fixed location and let it solve. then i would wait a day for CORS data to get accurate gps for the base and plan out my trajectories relative to that base (using whatever registered maps they use). alternatively you could survey the location where the base sits.
hopefully they can do something like: https://www.sawstop.ca/ to be safer. or maybe the moisture in the grass might send false positives making it not possible. i just fear an old blind/deaf dog getting hurt (or passed out frat boy).
Off topic, but kind of funny the first thing you see when opening that is someone missing a finger. I’d think you would want to demonstrate off the bat your product means you keep all 10.
spoiler: robot lawnmowers have been around for 20 years. they're somewhat popular in Europe. Ireland has robotmow, and Colorado based bigmow has a lawnmower thats almost as wide as a human is tall.
>One of the key features of the iRobot Terra is that it will not use a perimeter wire to mark the boundary of the lawn.
So the Terra is short for Terra-fying I take it. We havent even built an autonomous automobile that doesnt occasionally mow down an errant jay-walker, yet somehow a bladed autonomous vehicle is going to be safer? At least with Robotmow and competitors you have boundaries. You can run or crawl to safety if there were to be an accident. Nothing in the review seems to indicate theres even the potential for this device to detect a human presence. and a smartphone app? One good hack, and you now have a lawnmower that drives into a pool full of children, or a lawnmower that persistence hunts pets to exhaustion and turns them into gulash while youre at work.
I absolutely hate my iRobot vacuum. Constantly getting stuck and does a poor job of actually vacuuming. Not to mention the wireless beacons it requires cost ~1/3 the cost of the actual unit.
