Ok. After using the Blower for maybe 45 minutes, here are some concerns that immediately stood out and should be addressed…
Yarbo starts driving before the blower is up to speed. That’s a good way to miss patches of leaves. No good excuse for this behavior. And hopefully an easy fix.
Yarbo will immediately stop if I am anywhere nearby. “Person detected”. Same behavior as with the Snow Blower. Makes it somewhat difficult to supervise and observe what it’s doing. I have to stand a decent distance away, or try to hide behind things.
Yarbo ended up temporarily getting blocked by a tree root. This caused it to drive around the root to continue with the job. Here’s what was odd - Yarbo drove in a VERY wide arc around the root, like a semi circle. While driving in the semi circle, Yarbo didn’t bother to turn off the blower. Which meant it started blowing leaves all over the place, back into the cleaned part of the yard. Duh!
Follow Me mode didn’t seem to work well with the blower and the flex hose attachment. Basically, Yarbo doesn’t want to move or follow me. The feature works well with the SAM, but not with the Blower. I have three theories as to why…
The hose isn’t long enough for me to stand far enough away from Yarbo for it to see my entire body, watch me walking away, and start to follow.
Yarbo isn’t easily able to see my entire body because the black hose obscures part of the camera’s view. Thus, it really can’t track me well enough to follow me.
A combination of the two
I then removed the flex hose and re-started Follow Me, and it worked just fine. So somehow the hose is the cause of the issue.
Last thing - In order for Yarbo to make its way back to the dock, every area and pathway along it’s planned route to the dock needs to have a blower direction set. If Yarbo needs to traverse an area of a path that doesn’t have a blower direction set, return to dock will fail. This is another silly example of how the maps aren’t really designed in a thoughtful manner for a device with interchangeable attachments.
All this said, I was honestly really impressed with Day 1 of using the Blower. It was extremely powerful and the map planning was perfect. It did an excellent job clearing the zone I had set up. Now they just need to work on these issues (and I’m sure there are a lot more I haven’t noticed yet) so that the Blower can be as useful and turnkey as possible.
The blower is Yarbo’s newest module. The earliest most people got it was late December, early January. Since it hasn’t had a season of “use” IE Fall, it hasn’t gotten much love from the development side of things. They’ve added follow me, supposedly fixed that ramp up while moving, but still sounds like maybe there’s a bug there. Definitely lots of room for improvement.
regarding the person detected, you can disable that under safety settings if you want. Or at least, I believe you should be able to.
I noticed the moving before the blower is up to speed as well. Some turns the blower was on and others it was off. That caught me off guard and I couldn’t figure out the pattern.
Yea, I can tell that the Blower is not in a fully refined state yet. That said, I still was really impressed with its autonomous blowing abilities. The blower motor is obviously very powerful.
My thing is - From a developmental standpoint, ideally the company should be refining and perfecting it during the off season, so that come Fall, it’s 100% ready to go and these obvious and glaring issues no longer exist. If I noticed these issues within 45 minutes of 1st use, imagine all the drama and complaints once people really start using it.
Of course, the company currently needs to focus on the major issues with the Mower module due to their small developmental staff, so most likely these issues won’t be resolved until Fall and the complaints start rolling in.
Yeah unfortunately the squeaky wheel gets the grease. But at least they have snuck some improvements in there since release. I think they are doing the best they can to support it all with concentrated efforts on what is currently being used the most.
Motion is not in sync with blower, delay for selected Blowing Speed Mode should be added to allow take up to the speed before moving (also in Reverse). I saw message in the app kind of “Waiting Blower to take up the speed“, but it started to move in the moment Low speed was achieved (but High speed is selected in the settings for the Area) and it was for moving Forward.
Follow me issue with flex hose as mentioned in inital post.
Follow me mode with mirrored objects (panoramic window). Yarbo is trying to drive thru window to follow my mirrored image. I am not in details how to recognize mirrored object from real, but should be the way.
No scheduling. There is no reason to do not trigger existing plan on the scheduled time as it even documented with screenshots in wiki. Support promised to add it to the next firmware.
Thank you so much for taking the time to test the blower and share such detailed feedback ahead of the upcoming season. It’s great to hear that you were impressed with its power and map planning on Day 1, and that it did an excellent job clearing the zone you set up.
Regarding your first point about the blower starting to drive before reaching full speed, and your fourth point on Follow Me mode, we’ve received similar feedback before and have already shared these with our product team for further review.
For your third and last points, we agree that the scenarios you mentioned highlight the need to fine-tune the blowing logic, especially to better adapt to real-world situations. I’ll be sharing both scenarios with our product team for careful consideration and optimization.
We truly appreciate you bringing these up. Your observations are invaluable in helping us make the blower as effective and user-friendly as possible.
I also have the same issues along with something not sure anyone has talked about. When yarbo goes to do a job with the blower it spins on the charging pad left then right a few times before leaving, then sometimes it does not go at all and no error or anything just stops. If i manually leave the charging pad then start the job all is fine. The mower works just fine also. not sure why it would do this. my first time using it this year.
I had the blower for about three weeks now here are few things that I’ve observed.
If you blow on high speed, Yarbo battery will overheat regardless of ambient temp or sun
Pathway direction of blow is ignored if Yarbo leaves dock to go to the area and path blow direction is set to the left. Since Yarbo cannot blow to left while moving forward. So it blows to right anyways
Work angle is automatic, so if you create blow direction and Yarbo creates lines that has sharp corners that are less than 90 degrees, it does full spin to get to the path instead of gradual merge.
If you have trees with mulch bed and they’re clearly marked as no go zone Yarbo still blows all your mulches everywhere. It needs to do full blowing around the tree counter clockwise few times, then increase the distance of the no go zone
It appears to be best way to approach charging pad is by driving backwards, eliminating any type of turning on either turf or driveway preserving the surface.
Scheduling for blower task or any task is a must, nobody has a time to babysit a bot.
Yarbo does not take the path that is closest to charging, it should take closest pathway to get to work if multiple paths are available and it should change that route based on where work was paused due to battery low and what is closest path to the charger
These are a few things I could think of top of my head right now, I’ll write more as I explore the bot. Currently, I am unable to just let it do its thing without much supervision, I think product is in infancy, I hope developers take action to make it even better, for the price point it shouldn’t take this much work for the owner to make it work right.
Thank you so much for sharing your detailed feedback about the blower. I sincerely appreciate your observations, and I will be sure to pass along all the issues you mentioned to our product team for further review.
We value your input and are committed to improving the product.
It should also start 3-5 strips behind when it resumes blowing since during charging some of the leaves might have moved a bit. Like overlapping the work if it took a break to charge
I notice that the Yarbo while moving forward around the initial perimeter blow it stops its forward progress to make minor corrections left and right. Seems there could be a more continuous forward movement algorithm.