About a month ago i decided to purchase a XIAOMI MI home Smart Plan type Robotic Vacuum Cleaner after reading about it for weeks in various facebookgroups.

This robotic vacuum cleaner is a cheap vacuum cleaner that’s been getting a lot of attention because of it’s price and accessibility with home automation.

When I ordered the robot i wasn’t really sure what to expect but i haft to say that i’m positively surprised over how great it works. On my order from Aliexpress i choose to get the delivery from Germany which gave me a total shipping time of only three days!

This is the box it came in.

After unboxing and plugging the vacuum cleaner in – this is how it will look.

The setup was pretty painful. Since all of the documentation was in Chinese i’d had to youtube on how to set it up. But once i’ve figured out that all you needed to do was to download an app called ”XIAOMI home” it was pretty straight forward. After syncing the app and creating an account i could start the first clean.

This is the vacuum cleaner cleaning 🙂

This vacuum cleaner really does the job. It vacuums places that you normally won’t vacuum with attention, like under your bed or your sofa. However, it does not fully replace an ordinary vacuum cleaner since it wont be able to take areas where chair and tables are blocking.

After my first run i’ve got an notification saying that it had an firmware update available. And this is where it started to get a bit tricky. I’ve tried numerous times to update the firmware but for some reason it didn’t go thru. So i gave up and decided to try at a later time. The next day i had no problems updating the firmware and with that i also got the option to switch to the english voice pack (yes, the robot has a speaker and speaks to you with the commands that you give it).

After this i added the robot to my home-assistant.io setup and made a simple script making it available to start the clean with Google Home.

To summarize i’ve written some pros and cons.

Pros

• Cheap
• Effective
• Available in English (Voice, App etc)
• Integrations (Home-assistant.io, Google Home thru IFTT)
• Super fast delivery (3 days!)
• Can pass thresholds

Cons

• Requires great patience while updating the firmware and getting english as main language

 
Overall i can recommend this robot vacuum cleaner! Feel free to comment if you have any questions regarding this product.