Roomba Hacks

In May of 2006, iRobot, makers of the Roomba robotic vacuum, announced they had shipped more than 2 million cleaning robots, making Roomba one of the (if not the) most successful domestic robots in history. With 2 million of anything that can be taken apart, it was only a matter of time before dozens of Roomba hacks hit the net.

Roomba Costumes Wii-mote Control myroombud.com spazout.com/roomba

MyRoomBud was started by While Sony and Microsoft a couple of kids who wanted have been duking it out over to earn money to buy cow- polygons and megahertz, boy boots. They make and Nintendo brought to market design handmade Roomba one of the best gaming sys-costumes, including frogs, tems in recent history, the Wii. pigs, tigers, cows, ladybugs, The motion-sensitive controller and rabbits. Their motto is, makes everything more fun; “If you don’t dress up your with Roomba Wii you simply Roomba, it’s just a naked flick your wrist and command vacuum.” your Roomba to do anything.

Source code included.

If you have a new Apple MacBook, you can use the tilt sensor in a similar way.

As Seen Through the Eyes of the Roomba roombacam.com Roomba-Cam is a new site that catalogs videos shot from the point of view of the Roomba. The Roomba kitchen tour puts you in the (autonomous) seat of your vacuuming robot, but nothing is more thrilling than the “nighttime infrared cat hunt.”

Illustration by Tim Lillis

“The Robot that Vacuums and Serves Web Pages” makezine.com/go/ roombanet Despite many warnings from science fiction movies and books, Bryan Adams, an MIT Ph.D. student, decided it would be a good idea to use a neural network on a Gumstix Linux board to control a Roomba. Enter RoombaNet. Currently the bot is cleaning Sarah Connor’s apartment.

Roomba Music makezine.com/go/roomidi The Roomba has a piezo beeper that can play tunes. You’ve heard it. And its motors make noise. Why not put them under MIDI control? RoombaMidi is Java-based; RoombaMidi2 is written in Objective C and C. Both create a virtual MIDI instrument for use by any Mac OS X MIDI sequencer, like Ableton Live, Logic, and so on.

Cellphone-Controlled
Roomba
makezine.com/go/rcontrol
RoombaCtrl is a small Java
program for your Bluetooth-
and J2ME-compatible phone
that works with the build-
your-own Bluetooth adapter,
as shown in Hacking Roomba ,
or the pre-built Roo Tooth
available at Spark Fun
( sparkfun.com).

By Phillip Torrone & Tod E. Kurt

Courting this audience, iRobot opened up the interface to all current Roomba models, and released an educational version called the Create. With so many ways to hack these suckers, makers responded by building more projects and developing software. Here’s a roundup of some of the interesting projects.

Cylon Roomba Bionic Hamster makezine.com/go/cylon makezine.com/go/irobot

How does the Cylon base Using the new iRobot Create ship keep itself so tidy? With programmable robot, a a Cylon Roomba, of course. hamster can run around in a This tutorial has all you need clear plastic sphere control-to make a pulsing LED Cylon ling where the robot goes and Roomba, perfect for cleaning how fast it can get there. your very own Gaius Baltar or

Number Six flat. Robot Roomba Chimp makezine.com/go/chimp We’re not living on the moon, or driving flying cars, but we do have an animatronic chimp head that screams atop a Roomba as it cleans.

Roomba, Get Me a Beer makezine.com/go/roomba One of the first robotics projects we all seem to gravitate toward is building a line-following bot. This how-to for modding the Roomba IR sensors shows you how to make your Roomba follow lines on the floor … maybe even all the way to the fridge.

Tod E. Kurt is the author of Hacking Roomba. Phil Torrone is a pioneer of Roomba Frogger and Roomba Cockfighting.

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