Dreame Roboticmower A1

Lawnmower A1. Was a challenge to set up and was having some issues like getting stuck frequently, mopping problems, finally having issues with internet connectivity then I contacted customer support they gave me instructions about to send to check service I did I sent the lawnmower to them they fixed all the problems in the robot. Not everything is perfect give a chance and be patient the most important if have any issues call or email customer support or service they are there to help you. After my lawnmower came back he worked excellent dream has an amazing robots.

The garage is sized perfectly for the Dreame Robotic Mower & is easy to install and use. The flip up door/roof works nicely. The only suggestion I would give is to replace the plastic screw in spikes to hold the garage down/in place with aluminum spikes for more rigidity. I would also inter-mix a few longer spikes for more solid anchoring.

On the mower I am very pleased with its performance thus far. The navigation, obstacle avoidance, & no go zones have worked well. Occasionally the mower will miss a strip/part of the lawn, but at the end of the job go back to clean the missed strip/area up. My yard is shaped somewhat oddly though.

If you let your grass get a little taller between mowing you will need to raise the obstacle height parameter, otherwise taller grass can be recognized as an obstacle to the mower. But again adjusting the obstacle parameter on the app is quite easy.

As far as the app very easy to use.

I have a medium to smaller sized yard & it takes roughly 4 hours to mow between mowing & needed recharges. A larger capacity battery would be a suggestion for Dreame.

Overall very pleased with the cut quality/performance & would highly recommend. My yard is centipede grass. Southern Alabama

A1 is very compact, and the packaging was lighter than I expected. Setting up the charging station was straightforward—just a few bolts to tighten.
I used my phone to create a Virtue Map of my front and back yards, linking the two areas. The A1 navigates between them and mows the grass, avoiding obstacles easily.
The radar's accuracy is quite good, but I think adding cameras for redundancy would improve safety and precision. Note that the mower needs a Wi-Fi connection, so make sure the signal. My yard has mostly Zoysia grass, and the cutting performance is decent. I’ll keep an eye on how it handles other grass types. Overall, a solid purchase!

I received the mower in early June and was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to set up and connect to my home wifi and bluetooth.

As noted by others, mapping has been very challenging. In my experience, it is virtually impossible to set straight lines along the perimeter of my lawn as the mower will move with the terrain of the lawn. The controller is probably easy enough if you play lots of video games (at one point, I considered calling my grandchildren for help) but otherwise, it is likely to take a lot of time and patience to get this done. It's impossible to edit the boundary of a map once it's saved, so you have to remap to make those changes. Due to the slope and thickness of grass on one side of my backyard, I had to divide it into 2 zones. Since the two zones can't touch or overlap, I have to leave an area unmowed in order to make this work - I use my trimmer on this area. My front yard, on the other hand, has three distinct sections, requiring the mower to navigate across my drive and a paved area - it handles this with no issues. I do have one problem in the front along a flower bed - I need about 4-5 feet of clearance on the backside of the bed for the mower to go along the edge, turn and then edge mow. This is not possible for me, so I simply use a trimmer for this area.

It might be worth noting that the body of the mower is easily scratched. I have cement blocks that border my deck and flower beds. If the mower gets too close to these, it scratches the shell of the mower - This happened several times during mapping because of the inability to keep the mower moving in a straight line.

I have very thick St. Augustine grass. This was very challenging for the mower and it would get stuck frequently - even though the yard had been mowed to about 2.25 inches (just under 6cm). I dethatched the problematic areas and ran the mower at 6 - 6.5 cm and it does ok - rarely get stuck. Areas that have the thickest grass need to be mowed at 6.5 cm, but other areas are fine at 7cm.

The majority of my yard slopes in some direction and at various angles. In general the mower has handled the slopes with no issues. One side of my back/side of the yard has significant sloping with very thick grass. The mower was continually getting stuck, but after dethatching that area and mowing at 6.5 cm, the mower rarely gets stuck.

The mower was released in the US in June and I think it is important to share that my experience with customer service is the US support was not prepared for release of the mower. I do not believe English was the primary language of the person I dealt with and email requests with questions were forwarded to another group for answers. I believe there are a number of ways the product could be improved and I inquired about a beta testing opportunity so feedback could be provided. This resulted in being directed to the marketing group which apparently couldn't be bothered. I did receive a message on the app one day indicating I could click on a button to become a beta tester, but doing so has not resulted in any communications - maybe their thoughts on beta testing and mine are not the same. I'm sharing this experience because I do not believe this is a very customer focused organization.

There are numerous ways in which the product can be enhanced and improved. The app is OK, but falls significantly short of potential. This is the first release in the US, so shortcomings are not a surprise to me, but without customer focus, my expectations are not very high at the moment.

Despite challenges in getting things going, overall, I'm pleased with the mower. I would be happier if the mowing height were closer to 3 inches and the design of the mower had better traction in the back. The ability to use the customized mowing direction is useful in problem areas and the automatic direction change on the standard direction is nice. I can always get my front yard mowed on a single charge. The mower usually has to return to home to recharge before completing all of the back, but not a problem since it restarts where it left off.

The mower is enough of a novelty that it gets a lot of attention when working in the front yard. For this reason, I generally find jobs to do close by so I can watch for people stopping. Turns out this is a great way to meet all of your neighbors within several blocks - the often stop, introduce themselves and ask lots of questions about the mower. I always share the "good, the bad and the ugly" but always recommend it's a good purchase - I would certainly buy again.

The Lidar positioning is spectacular (light years better than wires or RTK antenna), but the robot itself is not strong enough to deal with old grass (roots) or tall grass (I would say taller than 2 inches). The robot is able to take care of an HOA house lawn but gets stuck many times, which is annoying. The solution we adopted to avoid the robot getting stuck all the time is adding soil to some parts, but, even though, usually the robot gets stuck at least one time per area. It is better than cutting the lawn by myself, but it requires some babysitting. The design is very good, and the software does a nice job. Improvement suggestion: development of a new model with traction in four wheels (AWD) with Lidar for positioning.