Wyze robot vacuum - map editing & additional enhancements

Another thing that is missing from robot vacuums that have a mapping feature is the ability to manually adjust the map. I have noticed that the robot vacuums that use lidar do a really good job at mapping but there are circumstances that make the vacuum miss areas because they are obscured and those areas can be very difficult to add to most vacuums since with most vacuums the map is created and never updated. A dead area stays a dead area because something has fooled the vacuum.

I second the need for map editing. We need to have the ability to manually segment rooms where we feel they should be segmented instead of just randomly. For instance I have thresholds with a height difference between a couple rooms and even though the bot makes it across it would be nice to split my rooms there so the vacuum didn’t keep climbing back and forth over the uneven threshold.

Also, we need the ability to change the names of the room tags (especially once we get the ability above), this will become much more useful when voice integration eventually gets enabled. For instance, “Alexa, vacuum the kitchen.”

Something I’m running into right now is that it’s Christmas, and during the initial mapping of my house the vacuum mapped its way around the living room and did a great job avoiding the tree and all the presents under it. However, once the tree has been taken down there is no way to get the vacuum to rescan that area and incorporate it into the current map. At the moment it looks like I’ll have to completely delete the map and start over. In the app there needs to be a button that will let me command the vacuum to either rescan a room or let me tap the map and send the bot to that spot to redefine its room boundaries.

And one last thing I thought would be a great improvement is the ability to tell the bot to ONLY scan the room and define the edges, WITHOUT vacuuming along the way. I expected that this would have been the first thing the bot did when I set it up, when I turned it on its sole purpose should have been to create the map. Then once the house has been completely discovered THEN go back and vacuum until the battery dies. As it is the bot scans an area and then proceeds to completely vacuum it before moving on to discover the next area. I’m sure in the test lab this seemed like an efficient idea but the reality is that I followed this freaking bot around for almost 2 hours (not including the time it took to recharge in the middle) just to make sure it didn’t run over and eat anything on the way or get stuck (which it tried to do a couple of times). So having a mode that only scans and defines the room edges, as quick as possible, while conserving battery as much as possible along the way so it can actually finish the scan on one charge would be greatly appreciated.

Despite the above shortcomings I love the vacuum so far, keep up the good work Wyze!
And thanks for listening!

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+1 for map editing. The vacuum worked great, but my whole main floor got registered as one room. Would be nice to be able to divide the kitchen and be able to send it just there.

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Map editing please! Between a room never getting mapped and the post Christmas changes once the tree/decorations are changed it would be awesome to tweak as needed!

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Has anyone tried that deleting map and rescanning? can that be done. I really like the vac does a great job just would like a cleaner line of mapping. Like the one provided below.

how did you get those nice clean mapping lines :slight_smile:

Once the room are created and edited, rotated. That would be nice to be able to target a specific area. For instance if some area of a room gets dirtier than the rest of the room and needs more frequent cleaning

  • by drawing the edge/boundaries of these specific areas
  • schedule a cleaning of these areas.
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Another for map editing. My house shows up as one giant room and it’s painful at best. I love the vac but not the mapping. I’d like to be able to set schedules based on suction levels for carpet vs hardwood etc. and without the ability to edit the map to the rooms/areas I’d like to do this with I can’t get the proper use from the vacuum without adding virtual walls. And since virtual walls are always square or rectangular I’m unable to get them set right without adding a ton of them.

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Oh yeah, I had to delete my map and start over on the second run. Personally I think this is a bug, for me I had run the vacuum and it had mapped about 2/3 of the house and it had gone back to the charger to recharge. Well, I figured it would be a good time to empty the dust bin but unfortunately I wiggled the vacuum enough that it disconnected from the charger and I’m not sure what the software thought at that point but it changed from a status of basically “cleaning paused to recharge” to simply “clean” and I couldn’t get it to resume the previous job. At that point since it hadn’t scanned the entire house it would never enter that area, as far as the vacuum was concerned that area was inaccessible. So I reset the entire map and had it start over. If you need to do this then in the Wyze app select your vacuum and go to settings, under there will be Reset Map. If you are rescanning the house I would suggest setting the “Suction Level” to “Quiet” so it gets as much distance from one charge as possible. If it does run low on battery it will ding your phone at about 8% but just ignore it and the bot will return on its own, mine returned automatically around 7%. Then DO NOT TOUCH IT, just let it charge. When mine charged back to 60% it took off again and finished the scan.

Good Luck!

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Yes to all of this. I have a kitchen/Dining/Living room that is fairly open and it only sees one room. Would like to separate and mark where we have a carpet/rugs to have more suction also.

Also - I have a room that the vacuum hasn’t found in 3 mappings. Trying again now. I’ve tried placing the vacuum in a mapped area just outside the room and it never goes in. It sees in the doorway on the mapping, but never goes in.

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Well, from the sound of it you’re going to have to delete your map and do a rescan of your house. See my post above about my suggestions for getting the best scan. This is what this particular conversation is for actually, asking for new features. We’re trying to let Wyze know that we need features added, we would love all of them eventually but some more than others right now. Specifically the ones that would help us right now would be to have a button in the app to tell the vacuum to go to a specific location and switch back into the original searching mode it did when it was building the map so it would UPDATE the existing map instead of having to start over from scratch. Because as far as I can tell it only ever does that type of scan on the very first run when the map is blank. The other would be the ability to define rooms properly and name them.

thanks for the instruction on resetting the map. also didnt realize the level of suction can eat up the charge. i was wondering why certain areas stopped so soon.

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i wanted to try using the virtual walls to create those boundaries maybe see if that cleans up the mapping a bit.

I’ve reset the map several times and each time it maps a little different. That said it never gives me rooms that are even slightly accurate.

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Hmmm, that’s interesting. Keep in mind that the vacuum will only “see” the room from the perspective of the floor so if you have stuff around the walls like I do then as far as it’s concerned that’s the wall. My rooms are not rectangle room like I would draw the map, but it is accurate from the perspective of floor space that I want vacuumed. Is yours doing something different than that?

Just for clarity I’m going to post the features that I know I would like and add in any others I’ve seen other people asking for or complaining about. (Sorry for the long post, details are important)

  1. MAP EDITING: Now I understand that being able to directly edit the map is a huge ask so at this point I would be happy just having the ability to point the vacuum to a specific location and having it rescan the immediate area like it did on the very first run when it created the map. This could be accomplished by selecting a “Scan” or “Discover” mode and let us tap the map or even select a specific room to scan (see request 3 below). This would simply UPDATE the existing map so we could stop having to delete and start over from scratch. Just as an example, when I take down my Christmas tree this year, or if I happen to rearrange my furniture, the software still won’t allow the bot to vacuum that area because the way the software is now it will never be discovered again.

1.1) MAP ROTATION: On a couple of the scans I have done with the vacuum for some reason it seems to create the map of the house on a slight angle. The issue here is that it generates the lines it uses to vacuum in a vertical and horizontal pattern as needed. When the house is twisted slightly instead of just driving straight down a wall it keeps trying to drive into it and bumps into it then moves over and does it again, taking FOREVER to run down a wall. If we had the ability to rotate the entire scanned map and lock walls into the vertical and horizontal pattern that the vacuum uses then the cleaning runs would be much more efficient.

  1. DEDICATED SCAN MODE: When the map is blank the vacuum has no choice but to start building the room map. But this is a fairly tedious process and takes time so I propose giving us a mode where the bot ONLY scans the room and bumps into everything to find all the edges but does NOT vacuum during the process. The hope here is that without the draw of the suction motor running continuously the vacuum will be able to (hopefully) scan even large homes on a single charge. Then have the vacuum either recharge or immediately start vacuuming the rooms it has discovered. I would also like to see during this scan mode that the bot does not roll over every square inch of the floor unnecessarily but simply investigates anything seen with the Lidar and finds the edges for those objects. And also incorporate this with request 1 above so when we request a scan of a specific area it scans but does not vacuum.

  2. ABILITY TO ADD/REMOVE/EDIT ROOM BREAKS: The vacuum does a great job scanning the room and finding edges but a really horrible job at figuring out what is considered a room. Humans are simply much better at this job so we request the ability to drag the room breaks to better locations and also add or remove them as needed. This could be accomplished very similar to the interface that is already available for virtual walls, if not added there directly by letting us choose to work with room dividers or virtual walls.

    (The 3.x requests below would actually only work or be necessary if request 3 above is complete)

3.1) ABILITY TO RENAME ROOMS: This goes real closely with 3 above but I wanted it listed separately to it is not overlooked. If we have the ability to segment the rooms properly then of course we should have the ability to name the rooms. Again, this could be added in the same location as request 3, under a map “Edit” button that holds the room dividers and virtual walls. Just let us tap on a room and edit the name. I have seen on other forum posts where Alexa integration is coming and by having the rooms named properly you could easily give us the ability to request the vacuum clean a room by name. “Alexa, please vacuum the kitchen.”

3.2) ABILITY TO SPLIT ROOMS AND ADD VIRTUAL WALLS ON AN ANGLE: The current implementation of boxes for “no go” areas work well for sectioning off an area inside an existing room and works equally well across a doorway that the vacuum should not enter but not every room opening or doorway in my house runs on vertical or horizontal lines. I request the ability that once a “room divider” or “virtual wall” is placed on the map that we have the ability to grab a corner and spin the box or line to create any angle without having to create a bunch of tiny overlapping boxes as we currently must do with virtual walls.

  1. ABILITY TO SET SCHEDULES AND SUCTION PER ROOM: Now I know that a schedule can already be created that includes the scheduled run days and times and it also allows the ability to specify the room and suction level. That’s great, Thank You! But I’m suggesting to add a default suction level under each specific room (Maybe under the map “Edit” button in request 3.1 above). This would allow for a default suction preference per room so I wouldn’t need to create so many schedules. Instead I set the suction level on the room itself and then I can create a schedule for the Whole House and it would honor the individual “default” suction level set on the rooms. I suggest leaving the option on the schedules in case we wanted to create a schedule that would override the room default, like maybe once a week vacuum the entire house with strong suction without having to change each default. By adding this to each room it has the added benefit of using the room’s custom suction level if I simply select a room from the map and hit the Clean button.

I hope the Wyze vacuum Devs see this list and help us all build a better product. It’s a great piece of hardware so far and with the addition of some software improvements it has the ability to blow the other, more expensive, vacuums out of the water.

If anyone has other suggestions please reply and I will try to keep this post up to date.

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Yeah this just won’t cut it. I blocked puff one room since it has a gate in front of it. I added it when scanning to try to get it to pick up a room but no luck. The vacuum doesn’t like my open floor plan even though there are walls around each room. Will reset again and see what happens.

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That’s interesting. Mine is somewhat similar and it did manage to give me room names. As you can see from my map they are nearly useless as Room 5 is 80% of my house. Now, that being said, I know that Wyze is actually working on allowing us to segment the rooms better. Not sure how long it’ll be but keep in mind they didn’t expect to sent out these vacuums till almost the end of January. The good news is that they are working on making the software better so just give them some time to work out the bugs. My software only assigned the room names after the initial map creation was completely finished. If it has to go back and charge leave it alone till it’s done. Oh, and one more thing, if you reset your map again watch it do the initial scan in the app and after the Lidar sees an area you don’t want it to go you can press the button for Virtual Wall and the vacuum will pause and wait for you to add the wall then continue scanning. That way it has a better chance of completing the scan.

Here’s my map.

An option to rename rooms and to reset the room dividers. Incase it split your rooms into 2.

Alexa integration with vacuum to start/return home.

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I just reset my map today since weve moved some stuff around in the house only to find out that the edit rooms option has been removed. This new map is completely useless, Please add the edit option back,

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