Roomba rover

posted Oct 14th 2005 9:30am by Eliot Phillips
filed under: robots hacks

roomba rover

[heathkit] and a friend built this rover a couple years ago. They picked up a first generation Roomba because it had all of the features they were looking for: a good bump sensor, low profile, wheel encoders. Before removing the brains of the vacuum they put it in debug mode and figured out the control pinout. After wiring in a PIC they had rudimentary control of the device. For some higher level processing power they attached a Virgin Webplayer (defunct internet appliance). The Webplayer has a mini-pci slot so they added a WiFi card. Now they can transmit video and SSH into the device for full control.

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Comments [9]

Reader Comments

Very nice. Pretty cool project!

Posted at 10:15 am on Oct 14th, 2005 by Gouki

i have 6 webplayers, now all i need are some roombas…

Posted at 11:21 am on Oct 14th, 2005 by chubbydork

That’s kind of cool. They appear to have it set up to recieve video. I wonder if it would make more sense to put a web cam on and have it transmit video (and make it waterproof so that they can sneak into the girls lockerroom with it?… kidding. )

Too bad it doesn’t appera to maintain the low profile.

Posted at 11:38 am on Oct 14th, 2005 by Blind tree frog

I really should update that page. Since the pictures posted there, Ed has soldered a CF card holder onto that spot on the WebPlayer mainboard, and we’ve been running it without the screen. This gives it a much lower profile – only an inch or two taller than a regular Roomba.

Initially, the webcam was used for basic machine vision (detecting and driving to an orange cone). Since then, we’ve tried getting a semi-live feed from it using vlc, but the Geode on the WebPlayer just isn’t powerful enough to do more than 5fps or. I’ve considered moving to an NSLU2.

I should also give credit to my friend, Ed (don’t know if he wants his full name up here). He’s the one with the mad soldering skills that soldered those 44 wiress in place. Soldering that CF holder on the Webplayer wasn’t a picnic either.

Posted at 3:22 pm on Oct 14th, 2005 by heathkit

Hmmm, I still have one of thoes Virgin Webplayers in my closet. Turns on, but has a blinking cursor after that. Guessing my DOC is fried.

Posted at 7:41 pm on Oct 14th, 2005 by Biggs

Excellent!

Posted at 8:22 pm on Oct 14th, 2005 by John

gimme some links damnit!

Posted at 9:59 pm on Oct 14th, 2005 by CYRIX

Quit your whining. What do you pay for this site? What have you submitted worth of inks today? If you really want some, http://google.com has lots of links.

Posted at 12:51 am on Oct 15th, 2005 by -pat

Looks similar to the zoomba project at roomba community.

http://www.roombacommunity.com/

Posted at 9:16 pm on Nov 12th, 2005 by Roomba Review