Greg In The Desert

It’s hard to believe but as much effort as I have put into my home automation system I have not had an automated vacuum cleaner. I have always been skeptical of the Roomba’s ability to clean floors adequately. That mostly came from a few friends and reviews I read online.

I have been considering trying one out for myself for sometime and when woot.com had a refurbished Roomba 530 model for $129 I decided it was time give it a try.

My skepticism was unfounded. The Roomba 530 does an excellent job of cleaning my floors. I have been amazed at the amount of lint the Roomba has picked up (no more lint tumbleweeds floating across the floor). It also cleans up all the pieces of plastic and twist ties that the cat uses as toys. I am also impressed with how well it handles itself across uneven surfaces and untangles itself.

It probably helps is that my floors are all solid, no carpet or rugs and my house is pretty small. So far I have been able to have it clean the living room, kitchen, part of the hallway and bathroom in one cleaning session, or mission as the Roomba users call them. I think that the Roomba could also clean the guest bedroom across from the bathroom but so far it has some difficulty finding it’s way.

I have an automatic cat that kills all the bugs in the house and now I have an automatic vacuum that cleans up after the cat. Since the Roomba 530 model doesn’t have scheduling capabilities, I plan to purchase a serial port bluetooth module that will allow me to remotely control the Roomba from my home automation computer. The computer can keep track of how often the Roomba cleans and send it off on cleaning missions when the house is unoccupied.

Once you get your Home Automation system up and working the way you want, you start to become dependant on many of it’s features. In my living room, I don’t have a wall switch to turn on the lights. I have a wireless palm pad, but I rarely use that because the motion detectors (also wireless) usually turn those lights on for me.

Last week I came home from work and none of the lights came on. After a few hours of troubleshooting I find I’m getting errors in Indigo, “undefined byte from w800rf interface.” The” w800rf interface” is the W800RF32A, a wireless receiver that connects to the computer via serial port, or in my case a Keyspan USB to Serial Adapter and it receives wireless X10 signals.

Is the W800RF32A bad? Is it a issue with the serial adapter? Is it a driver issue? I used a terminal program and can see that I’m getting data from the W800RF32A, I just don’t know if it’s the correct data. I don’t want to spend $70 on a new W800RF32A only to find out it’s some other component. For now I’ve got a plugin device that will send wireless X10 commands to the powerline, but it only works on one house code and doesn’t work with security devices.

That’s not the only problem with my system. I moved a lot of my switches to Insteon several month ago, but I still have several X10 devices in the house. For some reason I was not able to change or get their status via the computer. This happens with X10 sometimes but the signal issues go away after a while (one of the reasons I’m getting away from X10). After a month it became clear that there was something else going on. Thanks to a hint from the Indigo message boards, I determined that the X10 part of the PowerLinc V2 interface’s had died. Smarthome sent me a replacement this week and sure enough X10 is functional again.

The Home Automation system works good, when it works. Right now it’s not working like I want and it’s annoying.