Hi,
As part of the Hoeben family, and Internet savvy person, it is an honour - no, a duty - to be active with a blog on hoeben.net. Favorite subjects of my blog will probably include gadgets, cars (a special kind of gadgets really; Volvo's, Healey's and other classic english vehicles I'll be adding to my collection), music (Bach) and my favorite pet, Hobbes. So let's get going...
Yesterday I bought a Roomba. Remi (friend and colleague at the Digital Home team of Conexant) was raving about the Roomba, and I overheared Ronald (dito relation) ask Remi where to buy one. I chimed in that I would like to have one too, so off Ronald went to buy 2 Roomba's at the MediaMarkt. After a long night charging, I finally got the Roomba to do some vacuuming. First impression is that it is really good at it; it collected lots of Hobbes' hair and seemed to be pretty intelligent about obstacles. At the moment I write this post it is doing the most complicated room in my house; the kitchen. I just saw it rotate around one of the table legs, quite neat! The only downside would be that it sometimes gets stuck on doorsteps; I probably need to improve the 'Roomba friendlyness' of my house. A more fundamental issue could be that the Roomba I have is really designed for spaces up to 5 by 6 meters; observation learned that the algorithm uses the size of the room (small, medium, large) to determine how long it should travel along the walls with its patented side-brush, or how long it should traverse a room before doing circles again (I'll explain more about the algorithm in a later post).
The Roomba just triumphantly signaled it is done... So, that's it for today.
Maarten