Additionally, it’s unclear if RoombaMidi will actually work anymore, as Apple has deprecated or removed many of the Mac-specific Java APIs, including the MIDI one, that RoombaMidi relied upon.

However, you could always try RoombaMidi2 :
http://hackingroomba.com/projects/roombamidi2/
which is a non-Java version of the same idea.

Uncaught exception in main method: java.lang.RuntimeException: Error inside Serial.listPorts()

Any ideas? I’m using Mac OSX.

In case you don’t know your Hacking Roomba website is blank when accessed.

Rich

I thought I’d pass along an idea. Unfortunately I’ve lost the source code, but back when I was doing J2ME development for my cell phone, I came up with a way to get “simulated polyphonic sound” on a monophonic instrument (in my case, my cell phone). Basically the approach was to use the JMusic library to write a little conversion tool. The tool would time slice a MIDI sequence into 1/64th intervals and then round robin through all active voices as it processed the sequence one note or chord at a time. In other words, a C major chord played for 1/4 note would get turned into C, E, and G played over and over again 16 times in rapid succession. Your brain is tricked into hearing chords (that waver a bit in timbre like an old telephone ringer). It doesn’t work as well obviously when the song you’re playing has a lot of very short interval notes (like real fast 32nd notes and trills), but it still works tolerably well–it doesn’t mangle the song to the point that you can’t tell what you’re hearing.

I wish I still had the code for that thing, but I looked all over the place and I can’t remember what I did with it. It only took me a day or two to throw it together though–it was pretty simple. It’s based on an old idea I saw implemented with an Apple II computer back in the 80s. (If you remember, Apple II just came with a piezo speaker, so someone had rigged up a way to get polyphonic sound out of it using essentially this same technique.)

I thought I’d pass along that idea to you. You could use the same approach with your Roomba to get simulated polyphonic sound. You’d feed in a normal multichannel polyphonic MIDI sequence, and you’d get a single channel “simulated polyphonic” sequence that you could feed to the Roomba. If you put a separate Roomba on each of your 16 channels, and ran a deep multitrack sequence through your “JMusic demultiplexer”, you could probably get the sound of 64 to 128 Roombas playing at once–it’d be like a symphony of Roombas! You could go on tour as the

;-)

Have you tried using the RooStick on the PC after using it on the Mac? If not, try that known-good configuration again. Perhaps something happened to the RooStick or the Roomba.

(btw, RXTX will do away with this craziness in its next release and I’ll update RoombaMidi and all my other Roomba projects to use the new version)

But when i try to read the sensors:
sensors
couldn’t read Roomba. Is it connected?

Roomba is connected and updated with Osmo/Hacker. On a PC it does work (with other program).
Please advice, what do i forget to do?

Thanks in advance,

Matthijs