Awesome Vacuums

If you’ve got kids, you can bet LEGO bricks will be scattered all over the floor at some point. Inspired by David Wallace’s idea on The Office, Matty Benedetto of Unnecessary Inventions built a shop vacuum attachment that sucks up all of the loose LEGO bricks and automatically sorts them by size.

After building a toaster that can un-toast bread, Joel Creates wanted to see if he could rewind time in another unlikely way. For his latest build, he made a machine that can pull toothpaste back inside the tube using a vacuum pump. It’s also the fastest way to apply toothpaste to 100 toothbrushes.

Mayku’s FormBox brings the power of vacu-forming to your desktop. It connects to an ordinary vacuum cleaner and heats thermoplastic sheets to create objects and molds. Its can mold objects up to 150mm x 150mm (~5.9″ x 5.9″) and can mold objects up to 130mm tall (~5.11″). It works with a various plastics in from 0.25 – 1.5mm thick.

One of the big problems with Roombas and other robot vacuum cleaners is that they can’t go up or down stairs. Leave it to builder Peter Sripol and his pals to come up with a solution. They attached three ducted fans to a cheap Roomba knock-off, so it can fly like a drone between floors.

South African bathroom fixture company Ceramic Industries takes us inside of their Betta Baths factory for a look at the production process for its bathtubs. Each one starts out as a flat sheet of acrylic, which is then heated and formed using vacuum molds, covered with a fiberglass and resin spray, then baked.

When it comes to robots, the humble Roomba is one of the most useful. The only thing that would make one of these automated vacuums better is if it looked like a droid from Star Wars. Matthew Scott Hunter decided to do just that, and transformed his Roomba into a new home maintenance droid dubbed “R9-D9.”

Despite being known as Henry Hoover, the kooky canister vacuum isn’t made by Hoover. But that doesn’t matter right now. Instead, the perpetually-smiling cleaner ponders bigger questions, and dreams about another life – as a musician. And he gets his wish at 2:53.

Vacuum cleaner robots are great, but there are lots of places that they can’t reach. That’s where the Coral One comes in. It looks and works like a vacuum ‘bot, but its core can be detached and used as a Dustbuster-style handheld cleaner as well.

Anker’s Eufy RoboVac is a line of robot vacuums that are becoming increasingly popular because of their competitive prices. The newest addition to the family is the 30C, which works with Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant for voice control. It’s also slimmer than its predecessor.

iRobot’s Roomba i7+ empties the dirt it gathers into the Clean Base, which serves as both a dust bin and a charging station. The Clean Base has a disposable bag that holds up to 30 robot bins. The Roomba i7+ can also be instructed to clean different parts of the house via an app.

CirrusPilot has an awfully impressive mancave – a hangar which which packs fancy cars, a massive video screen, a jetski, and a single-engine airplane. He also employs a menagerie of six robot vacuums to keep the place tidy, and shared this video of them doing their chores.

(LOUD) If you’ve ever used a Roomba vacuum cleaner in your house, you know that it’s not the speediest thing on Earth. Takuji Aoki’s modded version is not only much faster, but can even drive on grass. Even Roomba Shark Cat couldn’t hang on to this thing.

The V6 Absolute is the most powerful cordless vacuum cleaner. With all the electronics – and the weight – on its handle, you can easily use it to clean even elevated surfaces. It lasts only 6 to 20mins per charge though.

The Dyson 360 Eye’s 360º vision enables it to see an entire room all at once, helping it map and move around. It also has the most powerful suction out of all robot vacuums, and has brushes for both carpets and hard floors.

We at TA have known for quite some time that intense and awesome can easily be used to describe vacuum cleaner ads; for you naysayers, behold the power of the LG Kompressor Elite.

Neato’s XV-11 makes other robot vacuums a-la the Roomba suck: instead of bumping around, it uses lasers to detect and map out objects up to 4 meters away; it’s due out 2/2010.