todbot blog

I just received my quicky non-business business cards. That makes them calling cards, I guess, and when I get more time I’d like to get really nice simple letterpress ones, with some sort of sumptuous paper.

These quicky cards are from some place I found on the Net, clickbusinesscards.com. Use their little web design GUI for 10 minutes, insert 35 bucks via Visa and I had cards being shipped to me. I get them in a matter of days, but when I look at the Fedex tracking info (aka “travel blog” ), I see the cards came all the way from Australia! Across the Pacific! Through customs! Into Tennesee?

We live in a strange wonderful world where it’s cost-effective to have business cards made on the other side of the world.

general | 1 Comment »

Setting up a Bluetooth serial adapter like the SparkFun BlueSMiRF isn’t very hard, but not very intuitive.

Bluetooth supports many “profiles” for doing various things (phone headset, address book syncing, file exchange, etc.) One of these profiles is the “COM” profile and is a simple serial port: raw binary data transmit and receive. That’s the profile these Bluetooth serial adapters speak. All Bluetooth stacks on computers appear to support the COM profile.

The SparkFun BlueSMiRF module speaks only the COM profile and when powered on and set up, looks just like a normal serial port to software. In truth it looks a little like a modem, because you can escape into a “command mode” that has an AT-compatible configuration language.

The full steps are below.
Read the rest of this entry »

hardware-hacking, macosx, roomba | 10 Comments »

It has started.

(image caption: factory robot wrestles Glock-9 from off-duty officer, shoots him)

They’re not going to take any of our crap anymore.

Scattered reports around the country show a coordinated effort by the machines to displace humanity as rulers of this planet.

ramblings | 2 Comments »

A couple of the Roomba projects got mentioned on the Net recently. Actually what was primarily mentioned was the wonderful editing job of the posts done by Phillip Torrone for the Makezine blog. The projects were on the front pages (briefly) of Makezine, Boing Boing, Digg, etc.! Very exciting. I’ve been collecting links of famous (to me) places were it was mentioned:
- Makezine blog, serial interface
- Makezine blog, bluetooth interface
- Digg, serial interface
- Boing Boing, serial and bluetooth
- Engadget, serial and bluetooth
- Gizmodo, bluetooth
- robots.net

Unfortunately, many of the comments on these blogs don’t quite get the reason for hacking the Roomba in this way. (many “what’s the point?” comments) It’s not to make Roomba a better vacuum cleaner or to make it into a fully-fledged autonomous robot. It’s to bring the fun of robots into your household very cheaply. If you already have a Roomba or don’t mind spending ~$160 for one, you can easily hook it up to your computer and have real live Logo with a real live ‘turtle’. Or make it dance. Or just play around with it.

It’s not often we can write programs that effect the real world.

And if none of that helps, just think of it more as a computer-controlled RC car rather than a vacuum cleaner or robot.

general, roomba | 3 Comments »

Update:
new version of RoombaComm released

As mentioned previously, I’ve started on a library to make Roomba-to-host-computer interfacing easier. This is the zeroth release of such a library.

The goals of this library are:

• provide full access to the entire Roomba SCI protocol
• provide a set of higher-level functionality on top of the SCI protocol
• create a library that is as cross-platform as possible
• provide interfaces to high-level languages/environments like Java, Flash, Processing, Max/MSP, etc.
• allow someone who’s not an expert programmer utilize a rapid development environment like Processing to quickly manipulate the Roomba.

Java was chosen as a language, since the RXTX serial library seems well-developed on many platforms and has been tested thouroughly in Processing. Java also has good network connectivity, making it possible to create a net-to-serial adapter for the other languages.

And so the RoombaComm API:

• RoombaComm for Java
• RoombaComm for Processing
• RoombaComm source
• README for the above

RoombaComm In Use
In both Java and Processing, usage is very similar. Here is an example in Processing, which also forms the core of one of the Java examples:

RoombaCommSerial roombacomm = new RoombaCommSerial(this);

if( roombacomm.connect("/dev/cu.KeySerial1") ) {
    println("connected!");
    roombacomm.startup();

    println("Playing some notes");
    roombacomm.playNote( 72, 10 );
    roombacomm.pause( 200 );
    roombacomm.playNote( 79, 10 );
    roombacomm.pause( 200 );
    roombacomm.playNote( 76, 10 );
    roombacomm.pause( 200 );

    println("Spinning left, then right");
    roombacomm.spinLeft();
    roombacomm.pause(1000);
    roombacomm.spinRight();
    roombacomm.pause(1000);
    roombacomm.stop();

    println("Going forward, then backward");
    roombacomm.goForward();
    roombacomm.pause(2000);
    roombacomm.goBackward();
    roombacomm.pause(2000);
    roombacomm.stop();

    println("Disconnecting");
    roombacomm.disconnect();
}
else {
  println("could not connect! :(");
}

If all goes well with the above, you should see and hear something like this:

The API functions used above allow for a very Logo-like programming experience. The API has also more detailed commands, including the ability to read the Roomba’s sensors. As there is no documentation, see the examples and source for now.

Expect a new version of this API with more examples and documentation within a week or so.

hardware-hacking, programming, roomba | 2 Comments »