Is this the beginning of the end?

July 14, 2004 4:35 AM

How to hack a vacuum cleaner.
posted by tcp (8 comments total)

"However, the Roomba is completely autonomous, and has no facility for remote control. So, we had to hack it."

Erm...mine came with a remote control. Nothing says class like having a little robot servant who can drive a beer across the floor to a guest and clean the carpet at the same time.
posted by TungstenChef at 4:52 AM on July 14, 2004

The Roomba Pro Elite has a remote control as far as I understand.
*Sigh* 250 Euro for the basic version is much too expensive.
posted by tcp at 5:31 AM on July 14, 2004

Nothing says class like having a little robot servant who can drive a beer across the floor to a guest and clean the carpet at the same time.

Children declared superfluous; details at 11!
posted by trondant at 5:42 AM on July 14, 2004

I'm still not clear on what exactly it's supposed to do...did I miss something? Is it supposed to be controllable remotely over the web, or is it supposed just allow floor-level browsing, or is it just a "Cram a PC in something novel" mod?
posted by LairBob at 6:20 AM on July 14, 2004

Heathkit's partner in the project is a friend of mine without an account; he offers some clarifications on their Feburary '04 undertaking:

our hack of the roomba wasn't just to 'cram a pc inside'. people had actually
already done that, with predictably lame results. You'll notice that we reverse
engineered the fucntions of all the pins on the microcontroller. To our
knowledge, we were the first people to make these specs publically available.
There are some people out there who want to sell you a kit to do what we did for
free.

Bringing a beer to you was always what I wanted to do with it. :) but my partner
was more interested in the vision software, so we went that way.

At the time, the newer roomba's with more advanced features were not available.

Nowadays, the robot is a lot more polished: the virgin webplayer's screen is
folded down, and battery systems are more robust.

posted by reishus at 10:03 AM on July 14, 2004

Interesting, and educated use of a robot vacuum. The only question is why you didn't spring for a mini-itx motherboard. I'm sure it would have allowed the horsepower to get 24 fps out of that camera, and the prices start at 64 euro. (533 with serial port, two PC133 slots)
posted by Keyser Soze at 2:03 PM on July 14, 2004

Bringing a beer to you was always what I wanted to do with it.
That is all well and good, but how would it get the beer out of the fridge in the first place?
posted by dg at 5:08 PM on July 14, 2004

dg, think about it. Make a beer dispenser system! Wood planks, plexiglass.....
posted by Keyser Soze at 7:10 PM on July 14, 2004