Roomba wars!
It all started out innocently enough. we had available (mostly conference schwag). The iRobot recently opened up their Roomba vacuum crowd frenzied; mild-mannered AJAX programmers for hackers, tinkerers, and makers to send control were pushing their way in to get a piece of the robot signals via a little hidden port ( irobot.com/hacker). action. Oh yes, it was on.
On Makezine.com ( makezine.com/blog), we posted A few days later the MAKE team was off to how to control your Roomba with a serial cable or a Austin’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival. Bluetooth computer, and all was well in the world. But Our little MAKE blog picked up two awards for Best you simply cannot have robots under human control; Educational Resource and Best Craft Blog, and in they’re better off sticking to Isaac Asimov’s “Three celebration we continued our relentless pursuit of Laws” than listening to us meat-based guardians. With robot gaming. The details are hazy, but basically great robot power comes great robot responsibility.
At O’Reilly’s yearly Emerging Technology confer- With great robot power comes
ence, alpha geeks and technologists from around great robot responsibility.
the world gather to tune in, turn on, and trade RSS
feeds. One of the nightly events, the MAKE Fest, we hustled a bar full of festival goers with some
showcased a dozen makers dutifully explaining their Roomba pool. And still later, with the help of some
creations, from wired clothing to retro arcade mods. Austin residents, we played the first game of “Real
This is when it happened. Frogger.” This in celebration of Frogger’s 25th
The ambient noise of conference chatter stopped, anniversary, of course.
cheers were heard, money was thrown on the table. The future of robotic games has arrived, it just
An underground Roomba cockfighting competition hasn’t been evenly vacuumed. Complementing
spontaneously erupted. Maker Tod Kurt ( todbot.com) this issue of MAKE (our robotics theme), check
just happened to have his Roomba with him; we the makezine.com/blog each day; we’ll have new
happened to have a couple extra with us (you just projects, updates, and more things you should (and
gotta love a conference where people have extra shouldn’t) do with robots.
Roombas with them).
Bets were taken; weapons were formed from what Phillip Torrone is associate editor of MAKE.
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