Roomba + Tablet PC = ?
ptorrone writes "Using "off the shelf parts" I have constructed another pretty good mobile robot for my home. A Tablet PC is the brain and the Roomba robot vac is the locomotion. I'm currently working on sending the IR commands from the pc to the Roomba and having the robot "do a tour" and post photos / video automatically to the "roblog" (my robot photo blog). So yah, the Tablet PC sucks ;-]"
Also, here is a list of other home-built robot projects on the web. They are interesting, however many of them are not as complex as this person's robot.
Some interesting projects include: OmniPede and TuteBot.
A friend and I did the exact same thing a while ago, but using a hacked virgin webplayer. It's an internet appliance you can get for about $50 off of eBay. We just ran it off of NiMH batteries and woila, instant robot.
The details are here. We wrote up all of our notes, including the pinout of the roomba board in case anyone else wants to do this.