The Roomba started to do the ‘circle dance’ again. I love the idea of the Roomba, and when it works, it is great. However, the design sucks. Any machine that has to deal with dirt and dust needs to be easily disassembled and cleaned. That’s a major fail on the part of the Roomba. It takes me an hour or two to strip it down and clean it thoroughly – especially hard is getting to the drive motors to clean dirt off the axle sensors that seem to be the cause of the dreaded ‘circle dance.’

Today, it took longer because (a) I managed to drop a screw inside, which meant I had to strip it down again to get at the screw, and (b) somehow I messed up reassembling one of the wheel drives and it was locked solid. So, I had to strip it right down a third time to access the drive. As I said, poor design.

Note to self. I ought to have thought about what I was going to write about. I focused on the screwdriver. I needed a shot of the drive unit. I am not going to spend another hour taking it apart and putting it back together so that I can get the right photograph.

Copyright © 2017 Gary Allman, all rights reserved.