Roomba is great, when everything is working right. Sometimes, though, it doesn’t work quite right. Some carpets – like the carpet I have in the great room of my house – trigger it’s cliff sensors, causing it to freak out and stop with an ominous tone that sounds somewhat akin to a sad “oh no”. Problems like that are easily solved (put white paper and tape over the cliff sensors), but not all of them are.

Recently, Flomar (my Roomba), has stopped almost immediately into cleaning and asked, rather cheerily, “Please remove and clean Roomba’s brushes!” And so I would open the brush compartment, pull them out and realize….. they’re still clean from the LAST time I removed and cleaned Flomar’s brushes.

I’ve since come to learn that this particular issue is a design flaw with the cleaning head module (CHM) in the 560 model, which – if your roomba is under warranty, iRobot will likely send you a new CHM that uses an improved design. IF however your Roomba is no longer under warranty… there’s still an option. You can perform invasive surgery into your Roomba.

The surgery involves taking out the CHM and cleaning the gearbox.

First you’ll need to take out the four screws holding the bottom plate onto the Roomba, (you can take off the spinning front brush first, if you want – it saves some effort), and pull that plate off. Then there will be four screws holding the purple frame around the brush box in place. Unscrew those and take the brush box and purple frame out of the Roomba. on one side there’s red gearbox. Unscrew the four screws holding that side of the purple frame together, and remove that side of the frame. Then, unscrew the six screws holding the gearbox cover on and carefully pull it off. Clean the gears inside however you want, if needed re-grease the box with white grease (use sparingly), and put it back together.

The underlying cause of the problem – as you’ll notice – is an accumulation of hair, dust and dirt in the gearbox that prevents normal operation of the brushes. As a result, a power output is required to keep the brushes turning, triggering the circuitry that determines if the brushes are dirty (and prompts you to clean them.) So, because turning the brushes requires too much power, it constantly stops and tells you to clean the brushes – even if the brushes themselves are already clean.

I have two cats living in the house, which means a TON of fur. This fur gets everywhere, and was a royal pain to remove from the gearbox. If you can, I recommend getting an updated CHM from iRobot. If not, give this a try – it may bring your Roomba back to life.

[Update: 4/13/10]:

I’m quite happy to see that so many people seem to be finding this post and find it to be helpful.   SOME of you might also find another post on my other blog useful: http://john.whelans.net/archives/705     –   My Roomba stays on the ground floor of my house, and has issues with dark colored flooring and it’s cliff sensors.  I tried the “piece of paper taped over the sensors” trick, but the paper kept getting messed up.   There’s a more permanent fix that doesn’t require cutting wires, soldering, or anything like that.    If you can work a screw driver you can do this – and it works great.

[Update 6/6/10]:

After about a year of cleaning the gears that drive the Roomba CHM (Cleaning Head Module),  the CHM in my roomba broke.  One of the metal spokes that the gears attach to caused enough friction that it wore through the plastic housing and threw the gears out of alignment.  I had two options:  Buy a new CHM from iRobot that has the same defect that caused this scenario in the first place,  or buy a modified CHM from a third party.   I opted to go for the modified CHM, which uses ball bearings to seal the gearbox from the cleaning brush chamber.   The end result is a CHM that cleans every bit as well as the original,  without having to continuously clean the gears.

It’s not cheap – $130 or so – but totally worth the money to avoid having to take apart my Roomba every few weeks.

I got mine from Vic – at http://vic7767.com.  He ships promptly and his workmanship is top notch.  Highly recommended.

Additionally, consider getting the AeroVac bin to replace the stock bin that comes with the Roomba.   The AeroVac bin is redesigned and works significantly better.    With that, and a bearing modified CHM your Roomba will become a super vacuum.

After almost a year I am still very happy with FrontPoint Security, and the alarm system.   The company has been very responsive whenever issues would arise – and that’s very important to me.   I’m realistic enough to know that problems WILL arise with ANY system.  The test of a company is how they handle those problems, and FrontPoint has exceeded my expectations.  They are prompt in responding to issues, knowledgeable on the systems and how to fix things, and will continue to follow up until the issue is resolved to your satisfaction.

Recently the service, which for those who didn’t know allows you to access your alarm from anywhere in the world via the internet, sent an unexpected bonus my way – an iPhone app.

The free iPhone app, Alarm.com, allows you to log in to your alarm.com enabled services natively from the phone.   This means I no longer have to go to a website, awkwardly enter my username and password, and use a sparse web interface to interact with my alarm system.   While that method still works, and worked well enough for what I wanted before, the alarm.com app makes interacting with my alarm a beautiful experience.

The interface is clean and straightforward, allowing you to see the current status of the alarm (status of doors and windows, armed or disarmed, etc), change the status of the alarm (arm/disarm), see the past history of events on the alarm and, if you’ve got the service, you can view and interact with an alarm.com video camera.

All of this works beautifully from the iPhone app, and there looks to be expanded ability to do home automation functions directly from the alarm.com app on the iPhone in the works as well.  The automation functions are ones I am waiting for, and am really hoping to see some cool things come from that.

The app is fairly sparse, but I didn’t expect much.  That said, it’d be nice if I could use it to change alerts, and do “everything” the web app could.   I’m not sure that’s realistic, or feasible, but it’s a “would be nice”.

Overall, I feel the app is a solid app for what it’s supposed to do.  It gives people who have alarm.com powered alarm systems the ability to interact with their systems via a native iPhone app, and does a good job of doing that.   It’s obvious that expanded functionality is coming soon as well, which means we have even more to look forward to.

I’ve been told that a Blackberry app is in development, so those of you with a crackberry addiction can get in on the phone app goodness as well.

In the year since I’ve started using FrontPoint’s Alarm.com powered service, I’ve been pleasantly surprised.   New features and capabilities keep being rolled out which keep expanding on the base functionality, making it ever more useful for a geek like me.

A few months ago, I noticed that my friend Jason (Hi Jason!) had a Roomba from iRobot.  For those who are unaware, the Roomba is a robot vacuum that can be set to vacuum on a regular basis at a scheduled time. This seems to me to be a pretty awesome idea – a robot that can do what I don’t want to – vacuum up my cat’s fur every day.   

While out with my Fiance last night we ended up at Bed Bath and Beyond, and on a whim decided to see if they carried the Roomba.   Sure enough, they did.  With a shiny 20% off coupon in hand I made my decision to finally get one.   And so I did. 

After letting it charge overnight,  and cleaning the junk that cluttered the floor,  I pressed the button to get it started cleaning and, sure enough, it backed out of it’s dock and started on it’s way.  Except after a few seconds it stopped and gave me a “oh shit I stopped working” noise.   Pressing the clean button again gave me a message to check the “Cliff” sensors.    After a few times of this it became obvious that Roomba was having some issues. 

I decided to try it on my hardwood flooring and low and behold, it worked like a charm.  And completely avoided my rug.  

A look on the Internet yielded that Roomba has problems with rugs with certain patterns,  especially where you have dark colors next to light colors.  This causes it’s cliff sensors (the sensors that help it avoid falling from one elevation to another, as if going off a cliff) to falsely identify a cliff,  and attempt to avoid it.  

The good news is, there’s a fix.   What I ended up doing was taping some white paper over the cliff sensors.  Sure enough, Roomba passed over the carpet with nary a pause, and my robotic friend will now take over my daily vacuuming duties. 

This is a viable solution for me because I don’t have any cliffs that the roomba would fall off – it operates on the first floor of the house.  For those who have this issue with a Roomba on the second floor, or where there are cliffs,  will have to be more creative in how they tackle this issue.  A Virtual Wall might solve that problem of falling off a cliff in those situations. 

I like my Roomba so far.   Especially since he scares the ever living crap out of my cat (and seems to have a knack for heading straight for her regularly).   It was incredibly funny to me when she climbed on top while it was in it’s dock, accidentally turning it on.  Bet she won’t be doing THAT again.

I’m not dead!     I am, however, VERY very busy and haven’t had too much time to keep up on here.  I hope to be able to post more on here in the near future as things calm down a bit.

This weekend I had a sad thing happen.  My smart home became an inexplicably dumb home.  Suddenly my life was thrown into disarray when I pressed a button and….. nothing happened.  I was left wondering what in the world happened. 

That’s when I looked at the control module for my Insteon home control system and noticed that the LED that indicates activity was no longer blinking.  The unit seemed to have lost the ability to detect anything.  This didn’t bode well, as while my Mac Mini is the brains behind the system, that control module is the spinal cord that allows the brain to transmit the signals… electrically… to the rest of the switches in the house.

The end result being that the spinal cord was cut and the brain could no longer talk to its appendages.

I did two things immediately.    First, I ordered a replacement and had it over-nighted – I need this control module for my house to work.    Second, I called SmartHome’s product support line to inquire about a replacement.  I did both of these because I wanted to eventually have a backup handy in case this ever happened again.     Plus, who knows if/when I will need a second control module J

When I called SmartHome I was somewhat amazed at the service.  I informed them I had a bad Powerlinc module and they were able to look up my account by my last name and billing zip code,  then noticed that I had bought the unit within the past year and issued a warranty replacement – with shipping pre-paid by them.   They had indicated that they could do an emergency replacement shipment if I needed it, but I opted to just use the normal replacement procedure where I send the defective unit and they ship the replacement when they receive the bad unit.  Since I already had one ordered to arrive early this week it just made sense to do it this way.

Until the replacement I ordered arrives a few things don’t work: My lamps in my great room, as well as my loft, don’t work.    My front porch light does not turn itself on and off,   my thermostat does not update itself daily, my morning mode doesn’t work – so my house doesn’t tell me the weather report in the morning, and various other automated lighting controls don’t work.

This is unsurprisingly annoying – after a few months of having a working smart home, it’s almost debilitating when it ceases to function.  It is, however, a good measure of how useful the smart home features have been for me.

Lessons to learn:     Avoid having single points of failure when possible, and have backup hardware available for your critical pieces. 

I’ve had it set up for a while such that, when I wake up in the morning I press a button on a keypad (mounted in wall) in my room and my room light comes up slowly – so as to be easy on the eyes – and the bathroom vanity lights turn on. The vent fan is then set on a 5 minute timer to turn on about the time my shower really starts producing steam – and turns itself off after about 15 minutes, ensuring it got all the steam. I press the same button on my way out my bedroom door and the bathroom light shuts off, as does my bedroom light.

Pretty cool way to do things – one button controls everything. It just got cooler.

Well, last week I was over at my buddy Jason’s house when he showed me what he’d cooked up for his mornings, and I was so impressed I decided to implement it too – he didn’t seem to have a problem with that as he sent me the scripts he was using to make it happen (Thanks Jason!), and I am planning on adapting the same technology for other uses down the line which I’ll share back with Jason.

NOW in the morning, I press a button when I wake up and all of the same things happen as I described above, with the addition that music starts playing over the speakers in my room, rising in volume for a short period of time (less than a minute) then fading down to the background as you hear the house say “Good morning, John. It is Wednesday, June 25th 2008. The weather calls for strong T-Storms and a high of 86 degrees” After which the music volume is put back to a more normal volume and plays through until you turn everything off again with the press of the same button.

So, how does this work? It’s actually the most complex thing I’m doing with the home automation system. My home automation server is remotely executing applescripts (via ssh) on one of my other macs, which tells the mac to pull down the weather report, parse it for the outlook and temperature, then reads it off. The music is all done via the same applescript, controlling itunes. The audio is sent from that mac to the bedroom speakers via AirFoil by Rogue Amoeba, using my airport express base station (with airtunes).

I’d LIKE to eventually have it be able to tell me what’s on my plate for the day by reading major appointments off my calendar ( or items from my action lists in Things), but I’ve yet to have the time to really dig down and see if I can get something like that going. Hopefully I can do that sometime soon, once I get my home office put together.

Speaking of which! I need your ideas! I’ve yet to put together a home office in the new house, and I’m currently in the planning phase for how to do that. I’d like it to be “geek friendly” and tech heavy, but also not cost a fortune. I’m going to be spending some money on a acoustic dampening rack enclosure for my xserve and dell servers (only getting a 4u enclosure, anything more is cost prohibitive), and will likely be building a desk out of some cabinets / book shelves that I have available for free (plus some lumber I can buy at Lowes or Home Depot) – but I need other ideas for techie things I can incorporate into it.

Leave your thoughts or ideas in the comments!

The old thermostat line was a 7 conductor,  only four of which were being used.  As I mentioned in that post a few weeks ago,  It appeared as though the line actually was two lines spliced together somewhere in the middle.   None of the extra three wires went all the way through, so it was essentially useless to me for using the Venstar.

I decided then to do what any self respecting DIY’er would do – I went to Home Depot and bought 50 feet of 5 conductor thermostat wire,  some wire moulding and wire staples,  a Black ‘N Decker drill (with drill bits) and crafted a plan of attack.

The Furnace is in my garage,    and the main great room of the house – easily the central location of the house – is down a short hallway from the garage.   In between the two (and taking up one wall of that hallway) is the closet where my washer and dryer are.   Perfect.   Plan crafted.

I ran the line from the furnace,    around the garage on the wall,   through the wall into the aforementioned closet,    across the top of the closet (above the door so you never even see it),  down the wall next to the door, THROUGH that wall and into the back of the thermostat mounted on the other side (inside the great room).   The total length of the run ended up being just about 40 feet give or take a couple of feet.   I did the drilling,   ran the line and then hooked it up on both ends ( Green wire to the G terminal, Yellow wire to the Y terminal, White wire to the W terminal, Red wire to the Red terminal and Blue wire to the Common terminal) and restored power to the unit.   A quick look at the thermostat confirmed that THIS time it actually powered up.

Next was time to test the unit out.   I put it in HEAT mode and put the set point about 10 degrees above room temperature.    Sure enough,  without delay the furnace started up.    I then tested the A/C – Put it in cool mode and put the set point about 10 degrees below room temperature.     The furnace turned off and the AC unit turned on.   Cool air started flowing – very nice.

Then I set the set point to AT room temperature,   and turned the fan on,     that worked too.

Awesome,  it all worked and worked beautifully.

The last piece of the picture was the Insteon module which would let me use my home control server to automate setting the temperatures.

That turned out to be pretty simple – you just plug it in.    Adding it to the server was no different than any of the other Insteon equipment I’ve used,  and is standard to how you add things in Indigo ( I won’t go into that here).  Sure enough, once I added it Indigo saw the current settings on the thermostat and allowed me to remotely modify them.

Late last week I got Prism Reflector working, which lets me see my Indigo control pages from anywhere on the ‘net.     This allows me a great amount of flexibility with controlling my home even when I’m on the go.

It would appear I spoke too soon.

While on the web portal today to set up a reminder that will send me a text message reminding me to arm the system at night if I’ve not armed it by a certain time, I noticed a section I had not previously explored – primarily due to the fact that I’m not USING the X10 features.  Specifically the “Automation” tab.   That tab lets me set up “lights” as X10 devices, and assign them names to track them on the portal.  I thought “well THAT is neat… ” and started to get interested in what I was seeing.  A subtab of the automation was “sensor-light interaction”,  which is where all of the magic happens.

Once you define the light devices (in my case I’m not using this as it was originally intended – I’m not defining lights, but doors) you can set them to trigger when certain sensors trigger – in my case, my doors.   Then whenever you open those doors or trigger the sensors, it sends the X10 command.

What was interesting, and REALLY cool, is that this isn’t limited to just the door sensors – I can do this with the motion sensor too, allowing me to have lights come on at night just by walking into the room.
The other piece of the puzzle, and the part I’ve not played with to set up yet,  is to set up the home control server to see those X10 commands and then translate those into the lights actually being turned on.   The trick is that I don’t want them to ALWAYS turn on,    but rather only when the lighting outside would dictate they should (say, at night).   The good news is that Indigo is well suited for that kind of customization and can easily handle that.

So, I’ve just found a way to fully integrate my alarm system into my home automation system to provide me with the ability to have a REAL smart home.

This system is like a christmas present every day

Tonight I wanted to play around with it to see what all the X10 commands are it sent out – primarily to see if what I would LIKE to do is possible (it’s not, yet).

Since the panel basically acts as a giant X10 controller, I was hoping to find that when I opened a door, an X10 signal would be sent. Specifically, a UNIQUE X10 command. Were that the case, then I could do a LOT more with the home automation (like, make it truly automated).

The scenario that I dreamt up was having the system set up such that when I opened an external door, the panel would send an X10 signal for that door being opened. That signal would be interpreted by my home control server to mean that it should turn on a light or set of lights near that door. The neat part (and part that Indigo would excel at) is putting conditions on that such that it only happened after sunset and before sunrise ( kinda like how I have my outside lights now, they come on a certain period of time before sunset and go off a certain period of time after sunrise (5 minutes, I think, for both). The server knows when sunrise and sunset is, so there would be no need to constantly update the system – it does it for you.

Adding that kind of control in, I could open the door, have the lights come on so I don’t have to fumble for a light switch before heading over to the wireless panel to disarm the system.

From what I gather, it looks like Alarm.com (and others) are looking into ways to improve the home automation aspects of these kinds of systems. I really hope they make great strides in that endeavor, as I can guarantee I would find a use for that kind of stuff. I’ve definitely been bitten by that bug and am anxious to see what new and wonderful things they can come up with.

I kinda wish they had a beta program like there are with software – but I’m a tech geek, so of course I’d feel that way

Anyways – this system has definitely proved itself to be pretty awesome. This is a *minor* disappointment, but in the grand scheme of things doesn’t change my feelings about the system. This was a “it’d be really cool if” kind of feature, but just goes to show that just because I can dream it doesn’t mean it’ll work

Regardless, Kudo’s to the FrontPoint, and Alarm.com teams for some great tech.

I was wrong.

Tonight, enjoying a nice quiet night at my house, I decided to play around with my home automation system. The heart (or perhaps brain) of my system is a Mac Mini (with OS X 10.5 Leopard) running Indigo 3.0, from PerceptiveAutomation. I wanted to clean up a lot of the clutter and kludge that has seeped into my configuration since I’ve been piecing this system together. While doing that, however, I noticed some stuff showing up in the logs – specifically, X10 commands. It was about this time that I made the realization that my alarm system was sending out X10 commands…. and my home control server was seeing them.

I then grabbed my keys and pressed the button on my security key fob that has a light bulb symbol on it. Sure enough, Indigo registered an “All lights on” X10 command (for house group A). I set up a test trigger action that triggered when it got that specific command, and executed a Insteon Group / Scene command (specifically to turn my great room lights on). I then tested. Sure enough, when I pressed the key fob button, my great room lights turned on. Awesome!

That was half the battle. The second half was – how to use the key fob to turn the lights OFF. Turns out, each time you press the key fob button it alternates between on and off – I think this is actually done based off what the panel thinks is the status of the lights. Initially I figured it would send the All Lights Off command, but instead it sent the All Units Off command. Once I figured that out it was easy to get the key fob to be a simple remote for my lights. No more stumbling into a dark house fumbling to press the right switch to turn the lights on – now I can do it before I ever open the door.

So far I *really* like my alarm system. This was just a bonus that made the system even more valuable to me. I’ve been very impressed with the quality of service from FrontPoint, and the technology provided by Alarm.com is amazing.

It was rather funny – a rep from the alarm company that handles the physical security measures at my office was out talking to me today, and he was all excited and wanted to show me their new system. He had me fire up a browser and took me to their new web portal which was…. powered by Alarm.com. He was a bit surprised that I already knew about it, but was happy to know that I loved the service.

I was quite happy to note that, about 20 minutes later when I finished installing the hardware, they were correct – it really is that easy and fast. Think about that for a minute: It took me 25 MINUTES to install my own home security system.

After I had all of the hardware installed I called them to activate the system. After providing a little info to let them find my account they were able to connect in to the panel and see that all of my hardware was, in fact, installed correctly and talking like it should. The (very friendly) service rep then walked me through the features of the panel – how to arm the system, how to disarm the system, and all of the additional features like how to silence the chime noises it makes, etc. He was very knowledgeable and the whole process took only a few minutes – I was very happy with the whole process. In under an hour I had a fully working – monitored – security system set up.

Once I had the system activated I received an email with my initial login credentials for the web portal. I was happy to note that these are temporary credentials – you can change them to something more suitable to you after your first login ( in fact, that’s part of the initial login/ setup process).

I was able to log in, customize my system with things like changing the names the panels would speak when referencing certain sensors, set up alerts on specific events to go to my email (and txt messaging), set up reminders to remind me to arm the system if it hasn’t been armed by a certain time (for instance, if I’ve not armed it by the time I’m usually at work in the morning the system will notify me and remind me to arm it.).

The web interface also let me add a system code for Ann (my girlfriend, for those who don’t already know) to be able to disarm the system, and set up alerts for her as well. Other functions include: History of past events, check the status of the system / sensors, and arm/disarm the system remotely.

Though I am really quite pleased with the system, it’s not entirely without it’s problems. Though in my case, it was a single problem and a call to FrontPoint support had it resolved in under 10 minutes. Specifically, on the morning after I installed the system it was reporting that the glassbreak sensor was malfunctioning. The support rep suggested that the sensor was not learned into the system properly and so we tried to re-add it. That involved deleting the sensor from the system then re-adding it via the system panel. It took a few minutes to perform the steps, but once done the sensor was working fine and the panel immediately reported an end to the malfunction state. I’m fairly forgiving of such things – small things like this happen sometimes. The important thing for me was that FrontPoint was able to quickly walk me through resolving the issue, and I’ve not had a repeat since.

Now – I must admit – I’ve not REALLY had the time to put the system through it’s paces. I’ve been using it for a couple of days now, but to really know a systems value and worth requires more than a few days of use. I really don’t expect to have any problems with the system, and in fact am really quite pleased with it.

My parents have ADT in their Florida house. They’re paying the same amount of money for ADT as I am paying, but are getting much less with it. I’m quite pleased with that.

I’ll post another followup in a few weeks, once I’ve had the system running for a while and can give a “few weeks in” update.

So far, though, it’s been great.

Also – for those wondering – the web portal is actually using the services and functionality provided by Alarm.com – this isn’t always obvious looking at the website, as it’s definitely branded as FrontPoint – but representatives from both Alarm.com AND FrontPoint have assured me that it is, in fact, utilizing Alarm.com services to provide the web portal. Very cool tech – for a demo of it head over to www.alarm.com