I am always surprised by those answers… Restricting the functionalities of the robot to solve a bug? The reply should be: « oh darn… another bug… please give us the width and height of the gate, will add this bug to the infinite list of bugs we have to fix… and thanks for that XXth bug report… »
Instead of acknowledging the bug they always rely with a fix that hinders the advertised functionalities of the bot…
Remember, when I reported the incorrect routing when having multiple pathways,
Their reply was… delete them and keep just one so it won’t get confused!!! Incredible…
I really really want to defend them, but those replies are soooo frustrating…
I agree that they are. They come off as very dismissive and a lot of the times unhelpful. But, they are trying to offer a solution for the now while they work on the long term fix. It would probably come off a lot better if they would say something to the effect of:
We acknowledge that this is a bug or a current design limitation and we have escalated it to the R&D team to be addressed in an upcoming software update. In the interim, you can try A, B, C, and D to work around the issue/limitation. Please let us know if you need help with any of those solutions. We will keep the ticket open in hold status until this issue has been fully resolved.
You seem to know things that common mortals don’t… Do they still have a R&D team? With the amount of unresolved bugs, very few updates and very basic software developments oversights, it is as if they were surfing on a codebase that was developed in the past but that they stopped development? Do you have information to share to start explaining why they did mostly no update since last spring? The last update was a basic throttling with a toggle that doesn’t work with a description with typos… the one before introduced even more bugs than it solved… and when you go back in the forum, all the bugs and fixes requested since April seem to remain unresolved… what is going on? Why can’t they release 1-2 bug fixes a week? Do they have a R&D team ?
They do have an R&D team and they released a lot of updates to us beta testers for testing in that time frame. The focus right now as the CEO and Vice President have stated publicly is to fix the poor and no GPS issues that are affecting the machines ability to operate effectively in those types of environments. That focus is improving Dead Reckoning (DR) and then adding Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO). When things come up that are big problems like the charging issue, they get pulled to provide a fix or interim solution for that and continue to try and focus on the fundamental big root issues. I think these two will solve a lot of problems for them and free the team up to really go gang busters on the back log.
I don’t know why they don’t release bug fixes in the interim. I have suggested this as well as others have. I can only assume it’s all hands on deck to resolve these bigger issues and then focus on some of the smaller stuff. It was important enough for them to delay tow mode which was demoed on the live stream. I think they have a lot of plates spinning in the air and are just doing all they can to keep them going. They’ll get it there.
But they cannot just let everyone in limbo like this and keep radio silence about everything else… And keep replying with lukewarm solutions when we submit a bug report…
And a good chunk of those bugs can be solved by a junior software engineer… heck, even undergrads can fix some stuff (such as incorrect character encoding, typos and translation issues in the app, non working toggles, useless scheduler, missing notifications, etc)… maybe keep 98% of hands on deck to fix the GPS issues and delegate 2% to fix the 80% that irrates people big time?
Also, they just raised 27M$… They can also hire some software engineers… and stop releasing new devices until they nail the ones that are already out there and falling apart…
Huge +1 to gate functionality. Stretch goal for me would be using it in conjunction with the promised smarthome/homeassistant api.
Right now the only time I can run the entire yard automatically, front/back/alley/dmz, is when we’re out on vacation and dogs aren’t home. I’ll go open up a small section of chain-link and then have to remember to draw a new pathway (or do it blind from 3k mi away since we can’t see cameras while mapping). (and ofcourse remember to go close it back up before the dogs get let back out)
