Living with Mi Robot Vacuum

I bought a Mi Robot Vacuum because my room gathers way too much dust—the kind where you leave your phone out overnight and wake up to a layer of dust on the screen.

I tried sweeping once a day, but it still wasn’t enough, so I figured I’d get a robot vacuum.

I looked on Quora and couldn’t afford anything they recommended, until I was scrolling X (Twitter) and saw that creep Wu Lao’er’s avatar, and thought, why not just follow Wu Lao’er and buy Xiaomi stuff?

I assumed the Mi Robot Vacuum would be hard to snag, but it turned out to be in stock on the official site… so I placed an order. Ordered in the morning, and EMS delivered it that afternoon. Damn impressive…

I don’t have high demands for this thing. It just needs to pick up dust, handle simple trash, and come out to clean once in the morning and once in the afternoon while nobody’s home. Ideally, it shouldn’t make me worry about it.

The robot is pretty big and thick. I haven’t bought any others, but at least this price is something I can afford, even if it’s not as valuable as the Xiaomi 5 Ceramic Premium Edition Wu Lao’er bought.

The machine needs to pair with an app called “Mi Home.” I just grabbed another phone, installed it, and started using it. Not many features, but enough: scheduled cleaning, cleaning maps, charging notifications, account binding, and so on.

I’ve used it for about a week and I’m basically satisfied. A few observations:

1. Smart pathfinding is fine—very smart, and it doesn’t get stuck just because the walls in some spot are complicated.
2. Cables are its worst enemy. Every time it gets trapped, it’s because a cable on the floor tripped it up and left one of its wheels hanging, unable to escape. The funny thing is, it does try to get out of ordinary cables; some of the more complicated ones there’s just no way. Remember to tidy up your cables.
3. Scheduled cleaning works fine and is right on time. It also gives you a cleaning report and a cleaning map.
4. Whether it’s actually clean or not is hard for me to say right away, but at least the dust bin is always filthy every time it comes back. It’s gotten a bit better recently now that it cleans more often.
5. The thing is not exactly quiet while running, but once you get used to it, it doesn’t seem like a big deal—like a self-propelled vacuum cleaner, which is basically what it is.
6. It cleans automatically and goes back to charge automatically. No major problems.

So I’m pretty happy with this purchase. It’s no wonder Wu Lao’er is so willing to be a miboy, even though I’m not one yet.

My mom thought it was useless at first, but after a week she came around too. She couldn’t help remarking that something you used to only see in sci-fi movies is now reality—it feels surreal.

Yeah, as a rube, the first time I saw that robot vacuum wiggle its butt toward the charging port and wiggle-wiggle its way into docking and auto-charging, I thought, damn, that’s actually pretty cool.

Don’t get me wrong—I mean the robot vacuum is actually cooler than I expected.