Roomba Hacking!

When I bought my Roomba from Woot a few months back, I always intended to interface with it and get it to do some autonomous stuff, using my EeePC as its “brain” (CPU, wireless network, display, camera… sounds good to me). Well, my RooStick was in Thursday’s mail from SparkFun! (BTW, I love those guys) I played with it for a few minutes before bed, then really got into it Friday night.

So far, I have a program that drives forward and slams into things (I read the “light touch” packet, and slow down as soon as soon as I see it, but the sensor seems to be blind to some things) that you can see below.

RoombaDrive v1 from Mark Walling on Vimeo.

I’ll be cleaning up the code for this and my book scanner (originally mentioned here) and post them to my Github account, hopefully today.

Last week on Twitter

• roomba hacking stuff in todays mail from sparkfun… let the fun begin :) #
• outlook is a lot snappier when you dont have 13k messages in your inbox #
• RT @codinghorror: “how long will your next project take? Analyze it here! http://www.sixtoeightweeks.com/ (thanks to Ólafur Waage)” #
• comeon FailEx, I want my replacement phone that was supposed to be here yesterday… #
• hudson and netbeans play nice together… its kinda snazzy #
• just bought the stuff to interface with my roomba from SFE :) #
• I just had a second coworker tell me i was reasonable… #
• i swear, keeping up with bugzilla releases is a full time job on its own #

Last week’s interesting links

• Markdown in Python: Overview
• wmd - The Wysiwym Markdown Editor
• hudson: an extensible continuous integration engine
• Welcome to github-tools’ documentation! — github-tools v0.1.7 documentation

Posted 08 Aug 2009