Vince's
Ramblings.

Now here is something I never did before.
I have a Neato vacuum cleaning 'robot' and after a year of 'hard work' it started to show errors on the display. The Neato website showed me how to 'reboot' the vacuum cleaner, but there was also a section about software updates.... Software updates for a vacuum cleaner. Quite logical if you think about it, but for some reason it never occurred to me that you could actually upgrade the software of a vacuum cleaner.
So I thought what the heck, just try it, and indeed after 3 attempts I managed to upgrade the software from 3.2.something to 3.4. something. Do I see a difference? Yes, noticed some considerable changes actually. The new software is claimed to have a better battery management system etc, but to me the most notable change is that is a lot more aggressive while vacuuming. It relies less on it's optical sensors and bumps harder and more often into obstacles.
The good news is that you can change the settings by adjusting the software yourself. You may think that as a software developer I will not be able to resist the challenge, but I decided to let the vacuum cleaner's software do it's thing unless it really starts to annoy me.

 6 February 2015  comments (1)