Level I Support and GPS

[mike1]

I am not going to pick a category because I am not worthy to start a new topic and will let the admin who approves post this (if it is) pick where to put it. This is part suggestion and part come on, this is nuts.

Level I Support is horrendous here. Now I am a very senior IT executive in a public company and have dealt with the likes of Microsoft and AWS for years but this is something else. First you can set your watch by the reply time as it is nearly to the second 24 hours from reply to reply. I can put a ticket in and 24 hours later get a reply. I can respond within minutes but still wait a full 24 hours for the next reply. In those replies I have found I get the same canned response I have seen here, usually starting with its my fault, my environment and so on. I saw this the first time when I reported the automatic resume on charge when it was over 51C. In that ticket I got the typical send pictures and logs, but I had included them in the first ticket. Had Level I looked they would have seen the logs and all pictures they requested. Instead they asked again and another 2 days go by until I am told its not my fault as initially indicated, but a known issue being corrected in an upcoming firmware release (I have a post on that from last week or so).

I then reported a GPS issue which like all GPS issues are promptly swung that they are our issue. Setup, DC view of sky, robot is in a cave and so on. I reported an issue showing the unit can sit on the dock with 12 or more L2 sats and 20+ satellites in total and indicate no gps so it will not start, but then another showing 10 L2 and 18 satellites and all is good. I provided 6 different images off screens/logs. First reply was asking for a picture of the DC and Bot. I get it, I said it was clear on both counts but they wanted verification so I sent and they confirmed no issues with installation. I then get a reply that Yarbo shows I have a great signal and I should not have these issues, could I send pictures of what the app logs / diagnostics is showing. I sent that in the very first ticket. I replied to that affect and then re-attached the images. I get a thank you and we are escalating and have heard nothing. Issue has additional background with rando gps drift messages that come and go. All provided in the initial tickets. Had someone just slowed down and read the first ticket with all information they could have moved this from Level I to II instead of wasting days. For @Yarbo-Forum and your canned reply of how this isn’t what you expect for customers, our treatment or quality of service, the ticket on this is GPS #106792. BTW, I am already questioning the purchase and am only in 2 weeks - starting to see why some say what they say.

Here is the rub. I get that Level I support is here to root out the silliness of things coming into IT. I have it in my own org, but they also can look at the initial information and decide what to do and they sure don’t ask for the exact same thing that was already provided like this is a Bill Murray Groundhog Day Movie.

So in the end. Yarbo you have two issues. 1: Your GPS has problems and they are not just while in motion. In most of your responses here you blame the environment and I have no doubt that is the case in some situation. IT IS NOT ALL.

Two: Your Level I support is horrible. I don’t care if they are in China, adjust your hours for the market or as you can see from my timeline they won’t respond even after a couple of min delay. Maybe some resources in North/South American?

Finally. I have been running large IT orgs for over 20 years. If you are relying on offshore resources like China, India or whatever engineering to address the MANY issues you have; you will NEVER get yourself out of this quagmire. Given the audience on this I am sure they can give you more than enough stories of offshore engineering and the quality that comes from it. Certainly it has a purpose and one that will get you some cheap code that might be 60ish percent complete, but you need a different mindset (USA or some European countries come to mind) to fully curate.

In the end if you want to be the dominate force in this space, invest in some non-China engineering. Spend 30% more on engineering and get 250+% more in return.

[B-Mod]

I agree on the GPS issues and tech support. It may be hard for them to hear, but they have to change this. I have one installation that had fine GPS signal and then right after and update issues, it has GPS but heading is too high. I move it 3 feet and it is ok. Start the work from that point and it turns around goes back to the dock, and then goes back out to work area. And all support will say is “are the antennas on tight?”.

For sure the software on this thing needs help!

[silvenz]

If your two weeks into owning your yarbo… Return it… You are a Beta tester for a product that is not ready… They do not have upgrade paths for you when they do a redesign of the product to fix oversights or just plain bad design choices.

Mows up to 6 Acres is a far cry from what it can do without intervention.

Their customer support will lie to you when they send out a replacement which is a likely scenario.

It needs supervision and attention unless you have a pristine environment.

They just have so many bad design choices.. and the software isn’t decently documented you have to come on the forums and rely on the community.

If enough people start return the units with complains they might start to change but their current pace of product development does not reflect a company that wants to dominate the space with an exception product…

[Deixi]

I could not have said it better myself. Support is so disappointing. For over 3 weeks I’m going in circles with my GPS issues. Ticket number is still #102036.

Always sending Pics and logs, they escalate but nothing happens, I change antennas from left to right. I restarted various devices…

In this situation yarbo came to a stop and lost gps, support is blaming the tree line (20m away) and yarbo is mowing from right to left I the picture.

I had a video call, the guy was not even aware of my ticket number, we startet at zero, 2½ weeks after me creating the ticket. So again me climbing the roof, showing him everything. He was not able to find aethimg walked over to a colleague. They restarted the DC and Yarbo, and told me all their data is fine, it worked for 7 hours, then the GPS problems came back again.

All I hear is that on their end everything is OK, but on my side it is not working as advertised, it is just standing under blue sky for hours of I don’t spot it. At the moment I’m yarbos babysitter.

Last advice was to disable Bluetooth on my phone, as my house is in the center of the areas to mow, everytime yarbo comes into the reach of my phone and the app is running it connects via Bluetooth. Which could be a problem, maybe, they think. For me disabling Bluetooth is not a viable option. (smartwatch, ear buds)

[Micke]

Is the yellow stripe at the top of your picture that seems to be around the perimeter due to Yarbo or it was already like this?

As for the GPS, you said you swapped the antennas. But did your try brand new ones? Sorry if I repeat myself (wrote about this a few times in other threads) my Yarbo was stopping under clear sky and acting oddly intermittently. Until I replaced the antennas with brand new ones. Never had a GPS prob since then (1 month now), except for rare transient pauses under very dense trees with covered sky.

May be worth a try?

[silvenz]

Disabling Bluetooth for GPS problems is obscene… Bluetooth operates at 2.4 ghz… Halo is around 900mzh… all of the GPS signals are between 1175mzh and 1577mzh.

If disabling Bluetooth does make any difference it is a internal problem with the radios inside of Yarbo as there is more than enough separation there should not be any interference problems. If it simply connecting to Bluetooth is a problem it is their problem to resolve as it doesn’t have a valid reason to be the problem.

This sounds like Yarbo just throwing out a Hail Mary “solution” for your problem to get you to go away.

The fundamental troubleshooting for radios is pretty easy… and yes GPS is a radio its just one way from the satellite to the receiver.

Do you have enough signal strength.

is there interference.

Poor signal strength is one of two things… Obstruction or something in the reciver path (Bad cable connection .. faulty antenna.. broken antenna.. bad antenna desgn ect…

Interference for GPS should be a non issue but yarbo should have access to determine that as well as signal strength… If the signal is strong and there is enough signal to noise ratio it should be working if its not then again that is yarbo’s problem to resolve.

If you can borrow or have access to something with GPS(handheld GPS unit or a car ect.) to check the area Yarbo is having a problem and it doesn’t that proves its a yarbo problem. Using your phone for GPS may not be good enough.. phones can and usually use additional trickery to resolve your location (Wifi signals in the area their strength or using the Cellular radios to see signal strength from towers and what ever other trickery that they can utilize to supplement GPS signals).

The only outlier that I haven’t mentioned is sun flairs or solar activity.. But that affects a broad area not you specifically.

So push back.. Do not let them Hail Mary you away with the weak Bluetooth excuse. (weak makes it sound like a stronger argument than it actually is)

[mike1]

I was hoping this thread would be one HUGE voice to Yarbo that their support, the GPS issues, the entire engineering team is a problem. I was hoping this would not turn into a try and fix the issue as people tell their stories of failures by support and engineering. I know people want to try and solve this, but there isn’t a solve in this forum for these larger issues. Its an issue with Yarbo. I just like @Deixi am under clear blue sky with a lot of GPS coverage. The issue is ENGINEERING and crap code. I mean how in the heck do you publish the app and break the link to the support ticket system? Why would you even be in that area of the code. Do they not have any QA be it manual or I certainly hope automated? Unit testing? Are they just cowboy engineering this thing and fire code out the door and wait for Facebook and this group to explode? Sure they have a handful of PPP (I think thats what they are calling the “beta testers” in the field). That honestly feels like that is it and that group certainly can’t run through every option, thats what automated testing is for. The first step is fix engineering and while doing that blowup Level I support of which I just assume Level II is engineering themselves which is even more crazy. And like I said, I think most of this is reliance on offshore resources that any USA, Euro or some South American Countries will tell is not going to deliver quality code. Take the money you blow on the resources for these fanciful “Live Broadcasts” that seems like that is even a problem for them to get up and running and invest in the issues.

[Micke]

I hear you. But on the other hand. For others it works pretty well… But if you look at my other posts, I do report several problems and bugs.

It is rare that things are all black or all white. I think they have a software engineering problem that needs urgent fix (see my other posts about that). On the other hand, I think they hold something. I’m now the owner of 4 robots and Yarbo is still by far the one able to do the most things. The software isn’t even the worse believe it or not!

It’s just that they really screw up on super dumb things and they seem to struggle to fix them. It is as if they had a great team a while back and then they lost some and now nobody understand their codebase?

Those things should be a <48h fix: 1) optimized routing (see my other post); 2) typos, translation, localization (chatgpt come on!); 3) basic unit testing (just follow programming 101 course guide and you’ll do much better; 4) Fix your app (scheduler, UI, area/work settings; etc.; 5) People ALL complain about zero turns. FIX THIS NOW, you can do it guys… before the summer is over if possible).

And stop assuming your clients are stupid folks that don’t know how to use an iPhone, and please read our tickets before replying with pre-written messages…

Now, the GPS… This is a bad one… If you have good coverage, Yarbo is doing surprisingly well.. If you have the slightest of problems (antennas, coverage, trees, whatever) then this is a nightmare… I don’t know what my advice would be on that one as since they can’t even figure how to fix simple stuff, I wonder how they can fix computer vision on low GPS signal…

Not sure where I am going with all this but I think I’ll conclude by saying that Yarbo is IMO the best contender for the best product in the field. But I really wonder what’s going on with the software engineer team… It should not be that complex to provide hotfixes with no typos and good translations for obvious problems with their software… My undergrads can do that for pretty cheap by the way… And they all know about unit testing… (I would be a bit more expensive haha)…

[mike1]

I guess I am not just breaking through on this one. I want it to work too, $7200 two weeks ago says it all. On the GPS, its not a signal problem on my end and they admit GPS is good (not hardware), placement is good (not environmental), that leaves what? Code. I can’t get the thing to pull off the dock half of the time, I don’t have the Pro mower yet so what am I in for on that? I don’t have any issues once it leaves and 50-60% of the time it will leave the dock without manual intervention. My point is wait 10 seconds between no GPS and tada it has GPS. I don’t need new antenna’s the unit is already brand new.

With all that said my point remains. The China engineering and support is never going to fix the issues. That’s this customers Suggestion and Feedback to Yarbo. Hopefully others will continue to agree or interject other clear macro problems that overarch all the issues across these forums. Then again if I am dead wrong and people think the engineering on this is top notch that’s fair also; I just don’t think we will see many takers outside of insiders taking that path. This has such major protentional to be a true market disrupter. It just drives me crazy that something so simple to fix is being ignored.

[silvenz]

I have noticed a delay when its been sitting on the charger and I open the app… It doesn’t have any GPS at all for up to 30 seconds or so.. I am guessing the GPS is powered down and it takes a bit for it to come on-line and get a few updates before it has its bearings…

My suggestion is return it.. and wait untill you have everything because after 30 days you will not be able to return the core anymore. But more importantly see the feedback your getting and what your seeing on the forums about how bad support is and support especially for a new product is important and they are really relying on community support and more people to pay to test their product to fund development low sales = minimal budget for development.

Pushing new products out when the existing products have so many issues is a clear sign they are trying to drive up sales over supporting the products they already have. Are the new products going to be supported better? Not likely new products will only stretch the already sparse engineering resources even thinner which means fewer fixes and worse product support.

[Micke]

Another way of solving this is an API. I think we would be quite a few with the expertise to create an open-sourced third-party app to at least work on the Front-end, scheduler, etc…

Or even better… They could open source the whole codebase and let us fix it… They would still have to sell the machine anyway so I don’t think they would lose on revenue… And as for trade secret, their navigation sucks so much that they cannot lose on that front either… Nobody wants to know that secret…

[B-Mod]

Want a scary thought? Just imagine how many broken trimmers there will be when that thing comes out.

[Deixi]

Sorry I think I wasn’t clear with the Bluetooth thing, I think it’s not on a hardware level but the software cuts whatever connection it has to switch to Bluetooth. So when it goes out of reach of bt it gets back to HaLow and gets out of sync.

[Deixi]

Yes of course the ruined grass is yarbos doing.

Yes I swapped and replaced them with yarbo originals, even replaced the RTK antenna.

My Yarbo is not driving under trees, there is a hard cut at my border, and I cut everything that stands over to my side.

[The_Quan]

I had issues with GPS too, I was able to fix it. First my HaLow died, I saw my Data center had a red light. Swapped motherboard, all is good. But I did realized something VERY important, Antenna placement, so i was curious, and I moved it out to the open on top of my chicken coop full view of sky, no walls , trees or structures at least 50 ft. Retaught my dock location, and haven’t had a blip since, on 1 acre land, for the first time completing without lost of GPS. That Data center is now in a box with a Wifi extender, and a solar panel with a Thermal fan controller.

[mike1]

Let me be crystal clear. Placement is not the issue here, already confirmed by Yabro (guess that’s how they are spelling their name now - see Adaptive Ramp description in your App - Settings - Work Preference). I am in the middle of 20 acres with nothing but blue sky. I mean come on, if you have a typo in your code that is your employer’s name doesn’t that tell us the entire story of the quality of everything! How does a typo make it like that for a new feature unless it had zero eyes on it for testing. If it did have eyes on it the group testing is just as bad as the sloppy code. This user group needs to stop pointing the finger at ourselves and start calling out what is clearly the most broken part of Yabro, their software engineering.

[silvenz]

It is their problem with bluetooth…

When it is on a work plan that suposed to be automated why is it connecting to your phone with bluetooth when it should be connected via Halow or 4G or even Wifi… There is no reason for it to connect via bluetooth when it is executing a plan unless it can’t connect via Halow 4G or Wifi..

Like I said you got a hail mary to get you to go away and not deal with the problem at hand.

Bluetooth connectivity should only be a fallback when it can’t be connected to by other means.. Anything that can be done via bluetooth can also be done by every other connectivity method.

But really since yarbo needs attention I am always going out to see if the mower is plugged up with grass or if the blades got stuck again … I am commonly in range of yarbo with my phone and it doesn’t do what your describing…

I am sure many other people are in range of yarbo with their phones as well while its working.

[B-Mod]

Mine will be out working and I am in my house and it will be on bluetooth at times as it gets near my house. Very annoying, I have to keep turning bluetooth off on my phone.

[rgloverii]

To be fair, Mammotion does the same thing with their robots and Bluetooth.

If the Luba (for example) is out on a mission, it has access to both WiFi (primary) and 4G (secondary). But if you walk over to the robot with your phone with their app open, it’ll automatically switch over to Bluetooth.

The robot doesn’t skip a beat during these handovers though. Just keeps on cutting. That’s why I personally think Yarbo’s issues are software related. Just not good programming.

[Yarbo-Forum]

Thank you for taking the time to share your experience so thoroughly. I sincerely apologize for the frustration you’ve encountered, especially regarding the repeated requests for information and the lack of timely resolution. You’re absolutely right—your original message should have been carefully reviewed before any response was given, and I’ve already shared this issue with the relevant team for reflection and improvement.

Regarding the GPS issue, I’ve flagged it for urgent attention, and we’re making sure the right people are now looking into it to provide you with a proper solution as soon as possible.

While our Level 1 support does currently operate 24/7 through a rotating schedule, we fully acknowledge that the speed and quality of responses still need significant improvement. We are actively working on raising the standard to better serve our users.

Thank you again for your candid feedback—it’s invaluable in helping us get better.