Hi All,
Last week I ordered a neato XV-11 and was amused when Sparkfun put up its XV-11 teardown before my bot even arrived! I was glad they were doing the teardown so I could satisfy my urge to see what’s going on inside without having to break anything I had just shelled out $400 for.
That being said, while it’s an interesting idea, and hopefully has a good future, I can’t recommend buying this product to anyone right now.
The bot worked for about half an hour before coming to a stop in the middle of a room and saying “RPS Error - please go to neatoweb” or some such. I probably should have dug a little deeper before hitting purchase but I’ve now found a lot of people, myself included are suffering from ‘RPS/Room positioning system/LIDAR’ error messages that just won’t go away.
I’ve tried charging the bot directly rather than letting it use its cradle contacts, I’ve tried setting/resetting the clock, I’ve tried putting it down in a simple room, and I’ve tried blowing dust out of the optics - it spins up the fan, the lidar, the brush then beeps… spins down the brush, spins it up again then beeps and stops with the lidar error.
Having called neato directly they inform me this is a known issue and the only recourse is replacement… Maybe this is the reason that the sparkfun LIDAR data is different from that posted here http://random-workshop.blogspot.com/201 … ar_25.html
My guess is that they did a ‘ready fire aim’ with the lidar firmware/hardware and have had to make some substantial changes 
I’m now in the process of trying to get free return shipping from robotshop.ca since a nearly DOA from a known problem is not something I intend to lose money over.
-Cannibal
P.S. My mainboard revision is 112. if you are dead set on getting this product I recommend making sure that you will be getting the 113 or later revision which seems to have many less problems than this one.