I am thrilled to announce that Hacking Roomba
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Ever since Bluetooth adapters for Roombas appeared, I’ve wanted to control my Roomba with a cell phone. All my recent phones have had Bluetooth. But getting a devkit for a phone was expensive and phone-specific. Trying to develop J2ME (aka “JavaME”) applications for cell phones has been a mess, especially for non-Windows users. Thankfully, Mobile Processing wraps up the ugly details, like Processing does for normal Java. It makes writing little programs for your phone pretty easy, and makes whipping up a program to control a Roomba possible. So here’s “RoombaCtrl”, a small Java program for your Bluetooth- and J2ME-compatible phone that works with the build-your-own Bluetooth adapter shown in the book “Hacking Roomba” or the pre-built RooTooth. RoombaCtrl DemoNow you can drive your Roomba with your cellphone like so: Continue reading RoombaCtrl: Drive your Roomba with your cell phone 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 to build a huge honking Roomba serial tether, you could build the Roombongle! The Roombongle is a USB adapter that allows you to control your Roomba from your computer, via the Roomba’s SCI protocol. Don’t have a Roomba? Get one! So I’ve written a tool that can turn any parametric equation into a series of Roomba movement commands. Mostly, anyway. The parametric equations I’m predominately focusing on are the hypotrochoid series of equations used in a Spirograph. To explore the space of hypotrochoid curves I created SpiroExplorer, a simple Processing applet that lets you to adjust the equation parameters in real-time. You can do the following things while it’s drawing: - left/right arrows change “r”, the radius of the inner moving circle Click the below to play with SpiroExplorer:
RoombaComm is Java library for communicating and controlling the Roomba. It works on any operating system that RXTX supports. This includes Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows. It also works with Processing. It will soon work with Flash and Max/MSP. It’s been a work in progress for several months and has gotten a little better as I work through improving it for the book Several bugs have been fixed, particularly with respect to Bluetooth on Windows. See the README for some info on that. Tested systems: Tested adapters: Demo command-line programs include: Processing demos include: This is what RoombaView looks like:
Download: Docs: At the next meeting of the SoCal instantiaton of dorkbot, I’ll be bringing an entourage of Roomba with me and will be demonstrating the hackability of them. Some of the things I’ll be talking about: - RoombaMidi / Roombas making music What: Roomba-a-go-go at dorkbot-socal I recently purchased a RooStick from RoombaDevTools.com. $29 + $6.50 shipping. If you don’t feel like building your own Roomba serial interface to let you hack your Roomba into a robot, you can use a RooStick. The RooStick is a USB-to-Serial adapter with a Mini DIN 7-pin socket on it that matches the SCI connector on the Roomba. It is an unencased circuit board with a USB connector soldered on one end and the Mini DIN on the other. The circuit consists of a CP2103 USB-to-UART chip and a couple of LEDs. Here’s what it looks like plugged into my Powerbook: While RoombaDevTools doesn’t advertise it because they are focusing on the Windows crowd, the CP2103 has drivers for other OSes. You have to hunt around the Silicon Labs site, but under the [update: The SiLabs site doesn't have a link to Linux drivers because the driver is already in the Linux kernel. It's called "cp2101" and should auto-load if you have USB hotplug correctly configured (like Ubuntu does)] Since it appears as a serial port to your OS, you can use any program that can talk to serial ports to control the Roomba. My RoombaComm API library and any of the apps built on it, like RoombaMidi work with the RooStick. Issues: Use their cable Hot LEDs Cable too short Other than those issues, the RooStick is a great way of getting into Roomba hacking. |
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