Fixed My Clicking Roomba!

OK, so it’s not like I cured cancer or anything, but, inspired by my pilgrimage to the Maker Faire in San Mateo this past weekend, I saw coming home to a broken Roomba robotic vacuum a welcome challenge. In a nutshell, the symptom being exhibited was the brushes not turning and the brush cage rising and falling at about 1Hz, resulting in a distinctive clicking sound. After a few minutes of this, the robot eventually gave up and announced that I should clean the brushes or something useless like that.

So I asked the almighty Google if it knew anything about this mysterious phenomenon, and, lo and behold, I arrived at this amazingly clear and eminently useful video on the You Tube.

Roomba Clicking Brushes Repair

I thought to myself, hm… that’s a lot of small moving parts, but yea sure I can follow that…  so I commenced with the disassembly, diving head first into the belly of the beast. Now I don’t know life is like in @dfraser’s household, but I’ve got two shedding cats and a shedding dog, and a generally dusty house. Having watched the video, I was completely unprepared for what I found when I finally cracked open the gearbox for the brushes. I was, to say the least amazed at the scale of the infiltration. I took some photos as I went, and thought I’d share them here. Hopefully they don’t gross anyone out too much!

Anyway, I cleaned it all up, resorting to a toothpick to clean between the teeth of every gear, applied a fresh coating of synthetic grease to the plastic gears, put it all back together, and…. IT WORKS just like new! I’m not gonna lie, I felt like a legend of robotic vacuum repair for about 15 minutes. The moral of this story is that you’d be surprised what you can fix and do yourself. I frequently hear people express a fear of programming, but for me it’s kind of a fear of the mechanical – screws, washers, and gears are mysterious… but once you dive in and take it apart, it’s really not so scary after all! Now for those gross pictures :).