Roombas Getting Wifi Coverage Mapping Capability

[DooKey]

iRobot Roombas will soon have the capability to map wifi coverage in your home so you can tell where you might need to boost the strength via a range extender or access point. The map generated doesn't tell you your speed and just gives you a db reading. Most of us here can find better tools to do this, however, for non-techies this could end up being a good tool.

The feature is arriving later this month on the iRobot app, making it possible for WiFi-enabled Roombas to create a map of indoor signals. The map exists alongside the existing Clean Map feature, letting users toggle between the two, like they would, say, satellite and standard imagery in Google Maps.

 

[CNote]

Put the extender in the Roomba... done

 

[Jim Kim]

The wifi signal is 4dB lower under the bed in the guest room.

 

[Cyraxx]

Meh, doesn't matter for me. With 2 dogs that shed my roomba fills up every run regardless of where it goes. So no real interest to me unless they can either store a lot more or magically empty itself during the cleaning.

 

[Seventyfive]

My stupid roomba stumbles around the house like a drunk sailor. It tried to clean my loft once but wants to clean my office 5x. It's better than nothing but the thing is dumb as rocks... Would love to replace it with something that doesn't navigate by smashing it's face into everything.

 

[VirtualMirage]

My stupid roomba stumbles around the house like a drunk sailor. It tried to clean my loft once but wants to clean my office 5x. It's better than nothing but the thing is dumb as rocks... Would love to replace it with something that doesn't navigate by smashing it's face into everything.

Neato's Botvac's use LIDAR to help navigate. Mine, while not perfect, works pretty well. It rarely bumps into anything, tracing very close around furniture. The dining room may be the only exception. Our table has sloped feet (low enough of an incline so that the bumper doesn't hit it), so it wants to try and hump it, eventually getting stuck because of its persistence. Yet, it has no issue doing pirouettes around each of our chairs legs without touching.

Roomba's higher end vacs use a camera, but I thought I read somewhere that it isn't as good as LIDAR since they don't do as well in dark rooms (thus then reverting back to the blind bumping).

Back on note to the original topic, that's a pretty neat feature to implement.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Meh, doesn't matter for me. With 2 dogs that shed my roomba fills up every run regardless of where it goes. So no real interest to me unless they can either store a lot more or magically empty itself during the cleaning.

The reason I would never have both a dog and a Roomba.