[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.

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My buddy Willy Volk at Divester has always been good about passing along stories about cool remote operated vehicles and this is no exception. A team of 8 engineering students at RIT have built an ROV capable of diving to 400 feet. Most schools design there ROVs for competition in pools, but the RIT seniors had a real-world goal: exploring shipwrecks in Lake Ontario. They built a lightweight aluminum frame and mounted batteries onboard. The ROV moves via four commercial thrusters controlled by an ATMega128. There are 3 video cameras plus HID lights. All control comes from a laptop using an RS-232 tether. More details are provided in their conference paper PDF.

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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]

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Brody thought it was high time we featured another robot project and directed us to his site: bfrdesign.com. For his line follower bot he used an old barcode scanner he found cheap at a junk shop. The scanner has a 2088 pixel ccd linear image sensor. Several red LEDs are used to illuminate the image and the data is fed to an ATmega8. The wheels are then driven using two Sanwa servos modified for continuous rotation. He’s got a couple other projects on the site and I’m sure we’ll see more in the future.

[Ryan Walker] had recently constructed a 16 R/C servo controller board and needed a platform to test it with. He wired 6 cheap TS-53 servos from Tower Hobbies to the bottom of an empty box. He’s got push buttons on the top for direction control. It uses a PIC18F452 for processing and the board was routed on an LPKF circuit board mill. There are videos on his site, but try using these cached links first: walking on a table and walking on carpet.

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