I’m unhappy to report about the demise of my cute little cleaning robot, an iRobot Roomba. It only reached the rather young age of two months, so I guess you can call it a case of infant mortality. It got killed by one of the most heinous dangers out there, an ant invasion of my living room.
Ants Killed My iRobot Roomba
January 20th, 2008 · 2 Comments
Tags: Technology
2 responses so far ↓
1 Thorn Stevens // Mar 30, 2008 at 12:54 am
How exactly? Roombas are actually seen as a way to kill ants!
2 Dirk Riehle // Mar 30, 2008 at 4:04 am
I’m not completely sure either. Here is what happened.
I had what I thought was an ant invasion. (Unfortunately, it turned out to be Subterranean Termites. Fortunately then, of the more benign kind.) My Roomba ran over them cleaning them up, somewhat. After this, the robot started sputtering and wouldn’t move well.
At that point of time, I could have sent it in. The robot was only two months old or so. Stupid me, I thought a cleaning job would do the trick. So I cleaned the robot. I even found a loose wire which I soldered back to where it was supposed to connect. (Silly me, I really should have sent it in.)
In any case, this brought the robot back to life, or so it appeared. It roams my living room again, unfortunately with a slightly high pitched sound, suggesting something is wrong with the motor. However, the main problem now is that it doesn’t really pick up much. So the cleaning function is gone. Not sure what’s going on, haven’t had the time to investigate.
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