Sunday, February 08, 2009

The robots are coming!

This is typical cat behaviour. 1st, check to see if the newcomer is at all a) edible, or b) bully-able.

Maui gets a new playmate, and the playmate collects a new toy.

After some getting used to each other, Maui and the Roomba are new best friends.

May picked up a Roomba for us on her travels. With all the fur, fluff and whatnot sloughing off our pets, and forming a daily layer of sediment on the floorboards, we simply cannot spare the time to keep our place neatly vacuumed all the time.

Solution: let a robot from iRobot do it for us while we're out at work so that the house is pristine by the time we come home. Enter the Roomba 560, electronic self-directed dustbuster extraordinaire! Battery-operated, it circles our floor and sucks up all the pets' sheddings. When it gets low on power it automatically docks itself with its charging bay for a nom, and then it's ready to go again, if that's what we want.

May gave it an initial charging while in the US, and on that single charge it performed quite a satisfactory job in our living and dining rooms. But to charge it again, Tong will be helping us to find an adaptor that can tansform our current (240V) to a voltage its American tastes are more accustomed to (110V). Until then, its initial charge expended, it's temporarily dormant while it awaits its next meal.

The Roomba isn't capable of miracles, though. It's a lot faster to do our vacuuming manually, and it misses the occasional spot, but that could be perhaps due to Maui messing with its operations as he tries to play with his new friend. But since we expect it to be working while we're out, it should be able to get most of the floor clean by the time we get back. For us, that's good enough.

Cool! My 1st Robot.

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