(I’m in a robot mood this week, ok?) [Wyatt] sent in his posterbot. Lacking the gift of girly handwriting, he grafted an inkjet printer onto his Roomba to make posters for him. There have been other bots to do this, my favorite being the graffitiwriter. Of course, [Wyatt]’s bot is less likely to get you arrested.
Want a shirt?
By the way, I’ve got a spare Hack-A-Day shirt sitting here. Send in a link picture of your Hackspace to the tips line. The best/worst will get some attention and the best one gets an official Hack-A-Day shirt.
Bluetooth Roomba Phone Remote
He’s pimping his book a bit, but Tod sent in his hack for controlling his bluetooth roomba with a bluetooth phone. He released the bluetooth interface hack Now he”s whipped up a phone application that lets him fully control the roomba via bluetooth.
Line Following Roomba
[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.
Roomba Midi Interface
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]
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.
Making Your Own Roomba “virtual Wall” Units
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”
Put The Roomba Robotic Vacuum In Test Mode
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
