Neato Robotics - XV-21

I use neato xv-21 15 years. all 5 neatos work fine. My "new" neato d7 work 6 years and fine too. The d7 vacuum cleaner is easy to disassemble, and unlike the Roborock, the Xiaomi is easy to maintain and repair. Maintenance involves removing hair every five years and replacing the side brush drive belt.

My XV-21 still works somewhat. I replaced a bunch of bump sensors but they still go intermittant. My D5 is very dead with the ribbon cable for the lidar burned. The thing that killed them for me was the run around support gave me. Playing up a language barrier to close my case and throw out my effort. Never again.

They never refined the very expensive design that contained 30 screws that were unnecessarily long and made of low grade alloy. The robot was way too heavy. They could have dramatically reduced the number of assembly steps. They didn’t innovate the PCB or the materials used or the software. They missed a huge opportunity with their iPhone app. It’s sad because they had a great head start with the XV-21.

[https://github.com/jeroenterheerdt/neato-serial](https://github.com/jeroenterheerdt/neato-serial) Basically it's for my old but trusty XV-21. RPI is needed to connect to USB Serial (Esp32 can't do that) and send the debug commands to start the vacuum. The relay is used to simulate "plug USB off before i can vacuum" message. I added one cron command to restart mqtt service every hour, since after rebooting home assistant it can hang. Otherwise no issues for over a year, like that i can start my vacuum after i leave home :)

Neato XV series for being awesome and being the first robot vacuum to feature a lidar sensor roomba 500 series, for a while they were the most popular robot vacuums ever made and still the most reliable, other than battery replacements they can last more than 15 years without issues Roomba 980, the thing is still a beast at cleaning and the navigation is good enough. No keep out zones or anything but it does its job well

I can get behind the idea of buying a vacuum that is already cloud free with the features of valetudo vs buying on to convert if that was the argument that he wanted to make but one of these two things actually exists today. I would make the argument that the one OP is suggesting exist too though they are much cheaper than what is being suggested, there are some really cheap robot vacuums out there that are IR controlled and I have very mixed opinions on mapping features. The old neatos with the mag strip no go zones were reliable, the mapping ones have been hit or miss and really create missed spots for me.

Maybe I am odd man out but I don't need maps, the only cloud or connected feature I really care about is being able to start it from home assistant when I leave the house, preferably when I leave with the dog too. Seriously, maps and my shark losing the map has been a bigger issue than my olllld neato that just mapped every time and used the mag strips for no go areas. That can be done with even IR on the really cheap vacuums from china. My house isn't big enough to or enough hard surfaces to warrant a mop. So you're not looking at getting an upcharge on me. You need to cut the price. I already have broadlinks in a lot of rooms so I can send the stop command too

neato actually used lidar and had good product.  the only issue with neato is reliability and high price

I run 11 Neatos 90 minutes 5 days per week in our house while we swim in another part of the house. Been doing it for 10 years. Not always the same Neato's though they are very repairable and I've made many repairs on them through the years.

Neato was the first with lidar. It was D shaped so it got edges and the aggressive brush was full width. Unfortunately it was over engineered like they were building a rocket ship with all kinds of sensors to make sure everything was working perfectly and sometimes sensors went bad throwing an error stopping it from running when it was perfectly fine. Company was purchased by a German company that destroyed it and they went out of business 2.5 years ago but kept the cloud servers running until recently. They can still be used manually by pressing the start button. But lots of features are gone. We use 11 so they are all done while we are swimming. We are retired and don't want to listen to them running for 8 hours per day if we just ran 1 per house level.