Comments on: Roombongle! A Roomba USB dongle

By: todbot

todbot — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 21:57:24 +0000

James, the Roombongle doesn’t require external power either. It *provides* power. It breaks out the ~16VDC battery power from the Roomba for your own use.

By: JaminJames

JaminJames — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 21:47:38 +0000

RooStick doesn’t require any external power – but it seems that Roombongle does. I’m not so sure what the advantage is. Is it the $17 cable you save?

By: Jetdillo

Jetdillo — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 17:54:44 +0000

So I have to rewire it anyways then it sounds like, okay, NBD

By: todbot

todbot — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 16:10:21 +0000

Jetdillo: The pinout of the Roomba’s mini DIN jack is totally different from the Mac serial port. In fact, it’s a 7-pin mini DIN, not an 8-pin, it’s just luck that the two different mini DIN connectors are mechanically compatible.

By: Jetdillo

Jetdillo — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 09:02:28 +0000

I have:
-Airlink101 USB/Serial adapter w/ 2303 chip, USB at one
end, DB9 on the other.
-DB9 to 8-pin mini DIN adapter (From an old Handspring Visor Mac compatibility kit)
-DB9 F/F Gender changer to deal with the multiple male DB9s.

Since the whole point of the hack is to attach the Roomba-compatible 8-pin mini-DIN cable to the serial side of the USB/Serial adapter, couldn’t you just hook the two together or do you still have to hack it and graft them onto each other?

By: Aquila

Aquila — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 21:35:11 +0000

Make sure to check your wires on the printer cable with a multimeter. I checked mine and they were color coded differently.

By: Aquila

Aquila — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 22:26:00 +0000

That’s Good news. You may soon get a Linux tester for RoombaComm. :)

By: todbot

todbot — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 22:00:37 +0000

Aquila, yes it work with RoombaComm, and any other code that accesses the Roomba via the serial port. The PL-2303 drivers on Mac OS X create a virtual serial port called “/dev/tty.usbserial0″.

Also, it looks like you can get very similar cell phone sync dongles off of eBay for less than $10.

By: Aquila

Aquila — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 21:54:27 +0000

Did you get this working with your RoombaComm library?

By: Nibbo

Nibbo — Sun, 23 Jul 2006 17:32:30 +0000

That’s really interesting. I’ll go make one right now, thanks!

By: MAKE: Blog

MAKE: Blog — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 18:21:25 +0000

Roombongle! A Roomba USB dongle…

Todbot writes “The RooStick by RoombaDevTools.com is pretty cool. It’s tiny and it’s USB, which is about all you need for me to bring you home. But if you want to hack together something similar and you don’t want……