Friday, August 10, 2018

Ecovacs Deebot N79S

The Good:
Price
Can pick up most small things
Doesn't go down a large drop (like stairs)
Cheap replacement parts
Great App
Comes with own remote


The Bad:
Not very smart
Get's stuck




This is the first time I’ve ever owned a robot vacuum so I had no expectations. Everyone knows that the Romba was the first and is considered the best but they are also the most expensive. I was recommended the Ecovacs Deebot N79S.
We have a short haired dog with dark hardwood floors. Any animal(including humans) with dark floors do not go well. Dark floors look nice in show rooms and pictures but from a practical standpoint, they suck. Why do we have dark wood floors? The house came with it. Why haven’t we replaced them? They cover the 80% of the entire first floor including the kitchen. Why anyone would get hardwood floors for the kitchen escapes my logic but that’s a whole other post.


Construction
It looks like Ecovacs did their homework in terms of how to build a robot vacuum. its seem well built and you only have to put together a few items (the two outside brushes, main brush and filter). And it’s good that you can take out and put in these items as they should wear faster than the other parts. You can find replacement parts for really cheap on Amazon. It does however appear more complicated to replace the battery pack. With the N79 model, it was just two screws to replace the battery packs. Now you have to take the entire bottom off to get at the batteries and it looks more complicated to put it back together, although I have not tried and good luck trying to finding the replacement battery. As this model becomes as popular as the N79, I'm sure replacement batteries will show up. It is all plastic construction with some rubber on the wheels. Overall, I would say it is built well.


Performance 
This is where a robot vacuum counts and this is where it does fall a bit short in my floor plan. My kitchen, family room share an open space that is connected to a hallway that leads into the study and then on the other side of the kitchen is a dining room separated by an open doorway. We have two couches in the family room and we have a kitchen table in the morning room behind the kitchen. 
When it does run, it does pick up most of the things you would get with a medium vacuum cleaner. It does a much better job than just a handheld vacuum. Where it falls short is in the programming. 
There are several settings you can choose from for the job. You can do auto which is suppose to go everywhere and make adjustments for what it senses, there’s a single room setting where it’s suppose to just do one room, there’s a edge setting where it just goes along the perimeter and a spot setting where it just going it bigger and bigger circles. 
I mostly use the auto and single room. I’m not really sure what is the difference between these settings. In my complicated room setup, it seems to behave the same. It has more than several times gotten “stuck” in a specific location where it runs the same pattern over and over. It turns into the leg of a sofa and runs into the bookcase behind it, it turns and goes along the bookcase but then it backs away then turns in to the sofa. It will do this for 10 minutes (draining the battery) and then it finally gets out of it. This has happened at least 3 times in the two weeks I’ve been using the vacuum every day. I think this is a software issue more than anything else. I can see how Romba is better because the more expensive model maps the room so it knows where it can and can’t go. It is worth the 3X cost over this one? Maybe. 
It can go over the edge of the oriental rugs we have but if it hits it at a certain angle or speed, it will think it’s blocked. It will remove pet hair from the carpets. 
It will get tangled and stuck on plugs and cords and wires. I have one sofa where the bottom is curved so that if it gets under it in one section of the couch, it needs to come out at the same section or it will spend 30 minutes trying to figure out how to get out. It’s just easier to block the section of the couch.
I’ve had to tidy up and wrap my speaker wires I had going under the coach. Something I should have done a while ago but the robot getting stuck forced me to do it. 
The base has a limited sensor range. I’ve had the robot pass less than 4 feet from the base and it still couldn’t find it. It seemed to spend more time hunting to recharge that actually vacuuming. If it was mapped, like a Romba, it would know where it is. Is that worth paying an extra $600? Probably not. 
Super easy to empty out the filter while it's charging



This is the state of the brushes after about 30 runs


Battery Life 
The unit would not run more than 30 minutes before it when to home base to recharge. I would check the battery level and it was only at 50%. Maybe it has recharge anxiety.  After contacting customer support and doing their suggestion of running it a short while, resetting the base and then charging it for 4 hours, it runs for about an hour now. Never the 90 minutes as was advertised. Maybe in less complicated rooms, it would run for longer. Your mileage may vary. 
I expect the battery to last about a year if I use it every day with each time the vacuum running less and less time. Replacement batteries, if you can find them, are about $45 each. the N79 required 2, almost half the cost of the vacuum itself. I’m guessing the company priced their vacuum low so that you would just buy another one instead of replacing the battery. 

The App
Ecovacs does come with a great app. It’s simple, clean and easy to use. You can set schedule, type of cleaning, etc. It also came with a remote so that if you didn’t have the app, you could control it with it. Programming from the remote is another matter. The instructions were not helpful in programming from the remote. 



Conclusion 
I can see where Ecovacs fits in with the overall robot vacuum market. They see how expensive the better Romba is and tried to make one that vacuums just as well but at 1/3 the cost. It is easy to use and maintenance is easy to do. The vacuum part does work well but it is not “smart” around furniture and the room landscape. Is it worth the cost? Probably. It has great rating on Amazon. I feel like if they had spent just a few more hours on the programming and charged and extra $20, it would be a fantastic buy. 

Thursday, January 11, 2018

Xbox One X

In terms of pure dollars is it worth the extra $250 over the Xbox One S? No. 
You get the same performance for most games. As of this writing, there are only 3 games that can take full advantage of extra performance of the Xbox One X, plus, you'll need a 4K TV with HDMI 2.1 to notice any difference and you'll also need a surround system for the full experience. I don't have a 4K TV with HDMI 2.1 or a receiver with that same standard. It does perform really well and games really do pop. Is that enough to justify double the cost? I don't think so. 




I chose the Xbox long ago over the PS system due to the controller. The Xbox One X controller is impressive. It is a step up over the Xbox 360 controller. It feels much more substantial and I liked that they still kept it to requiring just two double A batteries. Rechargeable batteries work well and offer the best life over "kits" you can buy for the controller. Amazon offers AA batteries with 2400mAh each. Most rechargable kits offer 2400mAh for both batteries. 



I do like the extra ports that the Xbox One X does offer. You can connect an external USB 3.0 drive to play games which you will eventually need. The Xbox One X comes with a 1TB of space but that will only hold 15-20 games depending on the size of the game. Games will become larger and larger. Some games coming out in 2018 are over 100gigs!


I do not like the fact that you have to load the game onto the hard drive in order to play the game. The Xbox One X does let you start playing without loading the entire game which helps but it's still an annoyance. Microsoft should have sped up the read and processing speed of the drive so that you can play off the disc since they sped up everything else in the Xbox One X. I feel that Microsoft will not make improvements in this area due to the fact that they really want to phase out physical discs. It's coming. 


Is it worth it as a long term investment? Probably Not.
Microsoft will retire the Xbox One S and the X will be lowest version of the console(It'll be rebranded under another name). I'm sure they'll come up with another version prior to that happening and you'll have to sped even more money for the next version. It's their way of taking your money. I tend to hold onto the consoles for a long, long time. I still have my original Xbox but don't play it. I have two Xbox 360s which I do use. 

The best bet would be to wait until a year after it came out for the price to drop or have them include more games or an extra controller. It may be worth while if you plan on keeping the console for 10 years.

Technical Specifications:
  


  • CPU: x86-64 2.3GHz 8-core AMD custom CPU
  • GPU: 6 TFLOPS, AMD Radeon-based graphics clocked at 1172MHz with 40 compute units
  • Memory: 12GB GDDR5
  • Storage size: 1TB HDD
  • External dimensions: 30x24x6 cm/11.8x9.4x2.3 in
  • Weight: 8.4 lbs/3.8 kg
  • Optical drive: 4K UHD Blu-ray
  • Input/Output: Power, HDMI 2.0b out, HDMI 1.4b in, three USB 3.0 ports, IR out, S/PDIF, gigabit Ethernet
  • Networking: IEEE 802.11ac dual band (5GHz and 2.4Ghz), 2x2 wireless Wi-Fi with Wi-Fi Direct
  • Power consumption: 245W