[Ben Miller] came up with a really simple way to turn a Roomba into a line following robot. The Roomba already has four “cliff sensors” built into it. Ben just added a potentiometer to the two outside sensors and then tuned the pots so that the Roomba could detect black tape on the ground. It isn’t your standard line follower, but if you draw a path using two strips of tape the Roomba will gladly stay inside. Here’s a CoralCDN link to the video.
todbot has developed a MIDI interface for the Roomba. RoombaMidi is an OSX application that acts as a virtual MIDI interface. It can be used by any standard MIDI sequencer and supports up to a 16 vacuum orchestra. It can even turn the vacuum motor on and off for a bass drum effect. I guess the circuit benders have a brand new toy on there hands, but who will be the first great Roomba artist?
[thanks Mike Kuniavsky]
[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.
the roomba virtual walls are what, in theory, will keep in the roomba away from places it shouldn’t go, like the fireplace. while roombas usually come with 2 units, wouldn’t it be better (and cheaper) to make your own? and maybe embed them in the wall?
Continue reading “Making Your Own Roomba “virtual Wall” Units”
those handy dandy robotic vacuum’s from irobot have a secret “hardware check mode” where you can test out all it’s functions to see if something has gone wrong with it, or
Join Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi as they get excited over the pocket-sized possibilities of the recently announced 2024 Business Card Challenge, and once again discuss their picks for the most interesting stories and hacks from the last week. There’s cheap microcontrollers in highly parallel applications, a library that can easily unlock the world of Bluetooth input devices in your next project, some gorgeous custom flight simulator buttons that would class up any front panel, and an incredible behind the scenes look at how a New Space company designs a rocket engine from the ground up.
Stick around to hear about the latest 3D printed gadget that all the cool kids are fidgeting around with, a brain-computer interface development board for the Arduino, and a WWII-era lesson on how NOT to use hand tools. Finally, learn how veteran Hackaday writer Dan Maloney might have inadvertently kicked off a community effort to digitize rare documentation for NASA’s Voyager spacecraft.
Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!
Download your very own copy of the podcast right about here.
On the recent 256th episode of the Hackaday podcast, [Kristina] mentioned her favorite fictional robot was Rosie from The Jetsons. [Robert Zollna] must agree since he built a reimagined Rosie and it even caught the notice of mainstream outlet People magazine.
We didn’t find much information outside of the TikTok video (see below; you can use the Guest button if you don’t have an account). However, there were a few clever ideas here. First, the robot mechanism is actually Rosie’s vacuum cleaner. Like a tail wagging a dog, an off-the-shelf floor vac tows the robot body.
Rosie herself is clearly an office chair base with an artistic body. The head rotates, and the mouth appears to open and close, so there’s apparently a little more electronics inside, but that’s nothing you couldn’t throw together with some RC servos and an ESP32.
Some videos cover the build so you might be able to glean more details, but the bite-sized videos aren’t very descriptive even though they are fun to watch. If you thought folks documenting their projects on YouTube was bad, you’re really gonna love the TikTok generation.
We like the look of Rosie, but as a practical matter, we need our robot vac to be smaller, not larger. However, using these off-the-shelf robots as a quick start for a robotics project is reasonable. Especially if you can pick up one cheap. Not that that’s a new idea. They even make stripped-down units with the intent that you don’t want to use them as cleaners.
