Robot Vacuum Software Dissapointment

Sure that’s fair I’ll remove that section to clear it up. Even if you don’t like the Honda analogy the point I was getting at is if someone has a problem and you don’t keep it to yourself. Doesn’t matter if you own it or not, is your comment actually aiding or contributing to the conversation or are you minimizing and undermining people. I can be a mechanic and not ever owned a Honda but I know about them and I have the right to make my comment.

You have every right to make any comment you wish. Just don’t be shocked if someone comments back.

Like I said, the problem is you don’t have the problem you are saying you have. All you were doing with your initial post is stirring up [Mod Edit]. You don’t own the product, as you’ve said have 0 other wyze products to even draw conclusions from, and are not contributing any information to other customers. If you were a honda mechanic exactly, you would have had experience with hondas. You have 0 experience with the Wyze vacuum and anything related to wyze, as you’ve stated yourself.

MOD NOTE: Post edited to conform to the Community Guidelines.

I’m okay with people commenting. Not everyone is decent like you though.

I have no issue with someone expressing themselves over any product. So far the vacuum works ok, but it has not returned to its base. It gets stuck in a corner, so I will see how it does. It’s good, but app needs work. You should be able to tell it to return to base, I don’t see that feature, which is weird. I will continue with it, but with a good sale you may be able to get a better one at close to the same price. We will see, time will tell if they fix what I believe are mostly software issues.

Interesting. Has your base moved since the vacuum left it? When you say it gets stuck in the corner, is it stuck on something and can’t move or is it moving around and doesn’t know how to get to the base?

You have no clue what my background is in programming or with robot vaccums. It’s not good to just assume people know nothing. I did programming in college. I know enough to know that there is a flaw with some of the robot logic that has nothing to do with hardware. You see how I never attacked the hardware ever because I know that’s not the problem. There are software issues, if that makes people mad that I don’t have it yet that’s fine. But I have the right to sound off on a product I bought and on people undermining other’s issues. I have the right to voice my concern. If I do get the product and it has issues is everyone gonna apologize to me? I don’t see what difference it makes. Those same people would have came in here and told me theirs works just fine. I’ve seen it on various threads, there’s a ton of guardians blocking any negative talk about WYZE. Again if yours works good for you, I don’t care. How are you mad another person has an issue lol? That’s weird behaviour. (Not you directly)

The Wyze vacuum moved past the base within an inch (from the base) and went another 10 feet across the room to the steps leading to the sun room then turned away moving farther from the base. I had to click over a dozen times on the app before it finally turned toward the base again and finally returned moving directly at the base. The base has never been moved since the vacuum was set up. I had decided where to set the base before the vacuum was delivered. I had another vac base at the location. I moved the other robot vacuum to the lower level, which I had ordered before I learned that Wyze would also offer a robot vacuum with more features for a similar price.

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| rdnaskela23
January 11 |

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Interesting. Has your base moved since the vacuum left it? When you say it gets stuck in the corner, is it stuck on something and can’t move or is it moving around and doesn’t know how to get to the base?

I have no concern for anyone’s background or skill set in this community. Nor am I satisfied with the operation of the Wyze Vacuum. My point is that one should need not be an engineer (software, hardware, QA or QC) in order to operate the vacuum or clean and empty it after its operation. The typical user would, in my opinion, be unable to set up or use the vacuum. I bought the vacuum as a gift for someone else who was unable assemble the vacuum out of the box or clean and empty the vacuum after it ran. I had to explain many steps in the owner’s manual. Much of the documentation was unclear and confusing. Setup and initial operation was a chore even for me a lifelong techie and geek. Next I had to explain the vacuum’s operation to her house cleaning service providers and then supervise its operation so that the house could be re-arranged to accommodate the vacuum, which itself was no easy chore.

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So I hope as a software engineer (I’m one too, for the past 15 years), you know that every piece of software you ever used has bugs. Alpha software has tons of bugs, beta has less, and production software even less but they are still there. When people encounter the bugs, you can see how wide spread they are, etc. I’ve had my share of issues with Wyze myself. If you see tons of people reporting the same thing, that points to a problem. Like the other person on this thread is rasing valid concerns, where certain things like returning to base aren’t working, or the setup process sucks, etc. But when someone says “my robot didn’t return to base” that doesn’t mean that feature doesn’t work or is missing. That can mean that they found some usecase which got the software into one of the states that has a bug. It still could (and by my experience would) work in 99.9% of cases where it tried to return to base. Now that’s not an excuse, they will find the larger bugs and fix them, and everyone’s vacuums will get better, and that’s how it works with all products. Including cars as we’ve used that as an analogy. Cars have bugs, and certain bugs are deemed high enough risk that there are recalls, while others can still be deadly but are deemed to happen so rarely that they just remain and no one knows about them. I might have some issues with those practices with cars, but I think the Vacuum has a lower chance of killing someone.

My reason for being defensive of the post is I’ve been part of and owned multiple tech companies, and have seen this happen everywhere. When a customer experiences a problem and is venting, that makes sense, and the company needs to figure out what to do. But in this case you have someone spreading missinformation. You were literally saying that they released a product that doesn’t do any of the things it’s supposed to do, is completely untested, and should be sued. As a customer I simply know the Sr claims are not true, and am trying to correct this missinformation both for the sake of the company, but also for the sake of other customers (including myself) and potential customers. Missinformation on social media can kill a company, and that wouldn’t just be bad for the owner of the company, but also for the millions of happy customers that they have.

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I definitely agree the setup is not a simple plug and play, but you need to navigate some quirks. I think if you identify the biggest hurdles in the setup process and we have other users with similar experience that can point to something that wyze can help us resolve. If you have the will and the time I think it would help starting fresh from a factory reset and seeing both what you run into during setup and what you see as the result after that’s complete. I don’t know why it wouldn’t return to base if it know where it is in the map, has a known path to it (however windy as long as it doesn’t have doors obstructing it etc), and you tell it to return.

Relax rdnaskela23, Mother Nature has bugs too and I’m not calling for her elimination. Perhaps a bottle of bug spray for me. Relax and re-read. Let’s address the product issues that a few of us have dared to report. What’s the misinformation? I described my experience. Where is the crime in that? I was responding to a question when I described the docking issue. Docking was not a issue for me as it was for you. My initial reaction was in support of another user. I was not submitting a detailed “bug report” but rather my initial reaction to the product in response to other similar commentary. Sorry to injure all the fragile egos here.

I’ll deal directly with Wyze from here on.

E_karhu I’m sorry there are 2 separate threads in the same topic. I think what you are doing is entirely valid and helpful, and I’m trying to find out more about the issues you are experiencing. I’ve reported my issues with other products, haven’t reported any wyze vacuum issues yet as I haven’t experienced anything I can reproduce yet. On the other hand I think what NorrisNT has been doing is detremental to wyze customers. And that’s the reply you were looking at. The replies in the forum look a little jumbled, but I’ve been trying to reply to each person separately

How would it know it is on another floor? I don’t see a feature to set it.
I have had mine for a week now and had it do two runs.
As you can see when I left the bedroom door open the first time it could ‘see’ all the way to the living room and kitchen.

  1. Bedroom only (all doors closed)
  2. Bedroom + Master Bath + Closet

Update to my earlier post
After having my robot vac a couple of days I am getting more impressed with it. Initially it did a mediocre job of mapping my house so I reset the map and let it map again, this time it did a much better job. Instead of just 3 rooms out of 9 it now identifies 5 rooms. Room 2 consists of the living, family and dining rooms, plus the kitchen and office which is about 75% of the main floor. Laundry, MBR, master bath and a separate bathroom are all separate rooms. For my purposes this is a workable map until map editing becomes available. I’ve been able to set up exclusion zones around the areas where the WRV can get stuck and I can now depend on it to complete a cleaning cycle, so I can schedule various rooms to be cleaned at night or while I’m away. The hardware has performed flawlessly since I’ve had it, and picked up quite a bit of dirt that my older Roomba didn’t. It is certainly usable as is, and over time I have no doubt that Wyze will improve the software.

Something we may be losing sight of is this is a $200 robot vac with Lidar. My Roomba, while several years old, cost several times that and would get stuck every time I used it so I could never run it on a schedule. Amazon has a Lidar equipped robot vac from Tesvor for $300 (it has its problems also), but any Lidar equipped robot vac from a widely recognized company is at least twice the price of the WRV. Overall I think Wyze has done a pretty good job, and if they add map editing and multiple floor capability it will be all I could ask for in a robot vac.

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I’m going back to my dumb deebot for now. Inability to get the device to map my one floor, and update it on subsequent cleans is a showstopper for now. First go round has gaps in rooms, and even if I target a room to be cleaned, it won’t fill in the gaps. If I tell it to clean everything and virtual wall off everything but the gaps, it still doesn’t update the new map. Covid is keeping me from having the freedom to let this thing clean all day long. It’s volume is a show stopper to letting it do it’s thing more than an hour a day. Give me the ability scan only to build the map, not clean (already submitted) or another way to build out the map without one, really long cleaning with multiple charge times. Tried going this route and pausing until the next day, but it turns off after being idle for a certain period of time and kills any progress it made. I’m on the beta app and firmware to get the map editor, but there is little need for that at the moment. Be glad to work with Wyze if they have suggestions, but they have been pretty quiet.

I have had my WRC for a few days and believe it is a winner, Apparently the space I want cleaned is about 878 sq ft which requires a return to charger to complete.
Not certain if the software is designed to provide the ability to only clean a particular room because mine cleans from the charger to the particular room rathe than just going to the designated room.

Anyone tried to clean a single space far from the charger?

NorrisNT I received my vacuum on saturday, used it for the first time, it was nice, no issues with Wi-Fi and docking station nor Virtual wall. Next time wanted to use, the map was not filed, erased from the app, but still in the history of use, impossible to download and load in the system, of course with no maps is impossible to perform the other actions like rooms, etc. I tried to reach technical support, there is no way you can get support. If I no received support soon with this issues I will probably returning. First step, I will use their social media and see.

It sounds like you simply got a lemon. I’ve had mine about a week now and I couldn’t be more happy. The initial set up and firmware update went flawlessly and the mapping and subsequent performance has been nothing short of amazing. Just return the bad one and get a new one :slight_smile:

The same (or more) could be said about writing a good review. I’m very happy with mine. The only thing i’d like to see improved is the ability to manually divide rooms. I mean the ability exists, i’d just like to see it improve. Right now, I need to select 2 discovered walls that are in the same room, then split them into two rooms. I have a center wall (open on both ends) that separates my kitchen from living room and dining room. The app doesn’t let me indicate them as separate rooms using that center dividing wall (seemingly like its a piece of furniture and not a wall)… i have to use other walls to split, and its not ideal. Just let me create a Virtual Wall, and use that for my room split. This is definitely not a show-stopper by any means, just an improvement. The mapping technology is awesome and the vacuum has done a great job of vacuuming my first floor several times now while i’m typing away at work. For $200, this is a great deal! And when you eventually let me vacuum certain rooms from an Alexa voice command, I’ll be even happier :wink:

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