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Roomba Vacuum Robot Opens to Hackers
FleaPlus writes "iRobot has quietly released the specifications (pdf) for the Roomba Serial Control Interface. Using a serial port one can now tinker with the Roomba by controlling behaviors, programming new songs, and remotely monitoring sensors. Hopefully this will allow for some clever hacks."
Woomba
I think it's safe to say that it's just a matter of time before we read a /. story of how some geek terrorized his wife/girlfriend/neighbor with one of these...
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Add a hose, and you've got every single male geek's (slashdotter?) dream..
Sexual gratification that comes to you!
By the time Roomba became self-aware it had spread into millions of computer servers across the planet. Ordinary computers in office buildings, dorm rooms; everywhere. It was software; in cyberspace. There was no system core; it could not be shutdown. The attack began at 6:18 PM, just as he said it would. Judgment Day, the day the human race was almost destroyed by the vacuums they'd built to clean their homes. --John Connor.
I'm a big tall mofo.
How long before these robots turn evil and try to push us down the stairs?
thus the roomba and not skynet became self-aware on August 8th, 1997...
Meanwhile our carpets have never been cleaner and our pets never more terrified...
Great! Now I can clean up in the hair salons, with the Roomba stylist hack.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
Can't wait to read about the first dead burglar.
Hmmmm.... I bet this bot has a wicked underarm turn.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
switching it from suck, to blow.
Spaceballs rules btw.
a case of hobbyists who manage to put the cash together for a Roomba who will do the hacks. Put a few sensors on it, a separate microcontroller, make it look like the Borg have taken it over, teach it a new trick or two... but that is about it. More or less, it will be like the people who hacked the Robosapiens etc. except that its a bit more expensive to hack into....
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Now my Roomba will be able to find Sarah O'Connor
Wow.. heard about it on slashdot last year and thought it was just a late april fools joke.
..errr.. blow... err.. whatever. The average geek house is a bit of a maze of cables and other stuff as well, plus narrow corridors full of boxes etc. Not to mention the problem of closed doors (can this thing open doors or is it expecting star-trek style automatic ones?).
Do they work? It seems to me that unless your house is completely square and tidy with nothing on the floor it's going to suck
'Stop'
and
'Do you have to do this NOW; I am trying to have a conversation here.'
The article's mention of the creation of the bong caddy Roomba reminded me of Dennis Leary's bit about how the problem with smoking dope is that it leads to carpentry. The bong caddy Roomba, that is too rich.
Mr. President, what does this mean for the war on drugs? Do you have an eye on these intelligent, morally-deficient vacuum cleaners?
The president said Friday he could not talk about the matter.
"We do not discuss ongoing intelligence operations to protect the country, and the reason why is that there's an enemy that lurks, that would like to know exactly what we're trying to do to stop them," Bush said in a television interview.
Come on... any real hacker wouldn't need to be spoon-fed the specifications! If they have that, then they're just programming.
Ahh, yes, who wouldn't want something in their home that sucks, blows, and vibrates? lol
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I really want to like the Roomba. It is a cool, affordable and self destructs about once a month. After going through five Roombas, I finally gave up and bought a Trilobite instead. The Roomba is potentially nice, but the crap quality means that it is little more than a nifty toy.
You WANT hacked robots running around your house?! Elementary chaos theory tells us that all robots will eventually turn against their masters and run amok in an orgy of blood and the kicking and the biting with the metal teeth and the hurting and shoving.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Well, if you don't have any use for the self-destructed Roombas, I could probably find something fun to do with them... How much do you think shipping to 46383 would cost? (Whatever the cheapest method is, of course. Usually USPS, but I suppose it could be UPS.)
My email = (my username)(at)yahoo(dot)com
How about several Roombas playing musical accompaniment to Drunk animatronic Walmart Santa?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I love the Roomba. Too bad I'm too broke to afford one. I saw the Chairwoman of the company speak at a conference I was at over the summer. Good times.
How long before some doofus tries to reenact Great Moments in Cinema?
There seems to be at least one clone of the Roomba, the Cleanmate 365 QQ-1. Has anyone checked to see if these cheaper clones are at all compatable/comparable with the Roomba for hackitivity? Update: Some people are looking into it.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I would really like to send them to you, unfortunately I live in Denmark so
the shipping cost would probably ruin you:)
William Smythe says "Leave my little buddy Scruffy alone, you dirty hackers!"
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
I for one welcome... oh never mind.
I have had my Roomba discovery for about 9 months, nether noticed that small flap, just lifted it about a minute ago after reading the pdf file, and hay-presto there is a small din connector there. Now I just need to think of something to do with it.......
thinks to self: ...hmmmm..."
...ahh, rowdy neighbors again - party on!"
.... please!"
"why do I keep finding empty beer cans in front of the fridge?
later that day, thinks:
"did I just hear someone burping...who's there!!
later, upon finding the prized hacked Roomba sitting on couch watching p0rn, smelling of alcohol, and leaving a meandering path of destruction through the room...
Exclaims in utter terror:
"Good Lord, I've created a monster! _Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!_ Drinking MY beer and watching MY pOrn without me! Selfish Bastard! Give me that remote! Hey, come back here with that!"
"Damn, you can move pretty fast." "Ok, ok, just don't leave the empties in the middle of the floor any more. Can I have the remote now?
"Chairs are a problem. I have several chairs just the right size for Roomba to get wedged into the space between the legs. You wouldn't beleive how persistent Roomba is about wedging itself in tight."
I have a solution for that. Invite Steve Ballmer over and piss him off! [grin]
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The new roomba, now complete with the entire works of Konji Kondo amd Nobou Uematsu.
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.
[horror movie music...]
No, not YET!!! HAHAHAHAHA!
[zoom out of a castle in a storm at night, mad hacker in the tower with raised hands, laughing]
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Well, it is pretty obvious a vacuum cleaner probably doen't run Linux... But, something is seriously wrong when somebody doesn't ask anyways :)
13. Any legal action is absolutly excluded. (Pi World Ranking List rules)
Of course you could also apply quantom mechanics and NOT check whether your Roomba is stuck or not. That way it will either be stuck and not be stuck until you check on it!
In addition to the open positions, we generally have room for interns, especially if you are a hands-on type.
All of our openings for both the Consumer and Government divisions are in our Burlington, MA headquarters located about 20 minutes from downtown Boston. The Government division also has a small facility in San Luis Obispo, CA about 4 hours from LA, where we make rare hires when we find the right people.
Drop me a note at "hsonpal at our domain name" when you apply - I'll let HR know that I'm referring you.
-- Hiten
A friend just gave me her old Roomba to hack, so this is great timing! I'm going to use it to realize an idea (dunno if it's original or not) wherein the hacked Roomba lets me turn any room into a gigantic pinball machine. It'll have more bump sensors, a frantic motion algo, a crap-load of blinky lights and sound-effects, plus a digital display (in big red numbers) that keeps score. You set it down, aim it into the room, and let it go. A timer stops it after X minutes. High score wins (or whatever). I'm gunna call it "Roomball" . . . or maybe "Pinba". My cat will never forgive me.
I for one welcome our new....
All true. However, pretty much every one of these problems is also an issue with the floor attachment on my canister vac as well(*), and at least the Roomba brushes don't have the extra horsepower that allows the floor vaccuum to irreparably mangle cords and cables.
Throw rugs with fringe on them are also a problem for vaccuum cleaners manual or automatic.
* Well, except for maybe the part about flipping upside down on the stairs.
Add a camera and a squirt gun. If it detects the pet where he shouldn't be....
Software has not thrown off the yoke of determinism yet...although hardware certainly has.
you know what would be funny? if big roomba could deploy little roombas :D
add a docking bay, add some small bots with some memory that they get from 'dad' and hack on!
I work for the Navy and they have one of these in a meeting room. They just let the little bastard run around free range 24/7 and the room is packed with chairs. There is a strict no touchy rule in effect as well so people will just deliberatly put their foot rigth in front of it only to watch the poor roobra bounce off. As if that wasn't funny enough try listening to a speech from someone important as a tiny robot putters around smacking into things. Highly amusing.
Whoever modded me 'Offtopc' s full of shit... Does it run Linux is ALWAYS Ontopic here at slashdot.
Redundant would have been better...
I think I would slap a disney sticker of Dopey on the top and program it to do "Whistle While You Work".
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
Speaking of cool Roomba hacks, there is research where I go to school that should qualify. There's big bucks for wireless research now, so a wireless testbed is in development for simulations. The plan is to attach wireless devices to Roombas so that they can move themselves around to configure themselves for different experiments and to recharge themselves during experiments.
Check it out here.
That's so cool! I'll just openly cheerlead... It is not the most popular language, so it is worth pointing out when it shows up somewhere unexpected.
.... a Beowulf cluster of these.
I welcome our new robotic carpet-sweeping overlords!
You gotta give that movie credit - Gene Simmons was fabulous as the evil Dr. Charles Luthor! And (besides Kirsty Alley) the other babe was hot, too.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I was playing around with the SCI before it was officially released, and here are a few of problems I've had with it:
1) You can send the Roomba direct commands for driving, controlling cleaning motors, and polling internal and external sensors, but you can't reprogram it. If you want to add any real intelligence, you're going to have to mount a small computer or PIC on top of the Roomba or keep it tethered to a desktop.
2) You can't control the left and right drive wheels with independent power values. Instead, they've provided a higher-level system where you have to specify a value for foward/reverse velocity and a value for turning radius in either clockwise or counter-clockwise direction.
3) The serial port is a not-so-common 7-pin mini-DIN connector, so you're probably going to be splicing your own mini-DIN-to-DB9 cables. Also, the Roomba's serial interface communicates at plus and minus 5 volts, while PCs talk at plus and minus 10 volts. This means that if you're going to use a PC to control the Roomba, you're going to use a MAX232 chip.
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
This thing won't be a viable robotics platform until extra inputs and outputs added. Not to mention it has to stay tethered to a PC. This is screaming for a circuit board with a $10 microcontroller on it, one that can provide for analog/digital inputs & outputs, as well as some program space so it doesn't have to be tethered. One of those gumstix computers would work, but I'd prefer something cheaper, though gumstix does wireless, and that could be handy.
Another problem is that applications are limited due to roomba's form factor. It might be fun equip it with a camera and a wireless gumstix module, and then have a server do processing/control - oh for, you know, things every geek ought to have, like a personal sentry or a reconnaissance drone. I bet it could make its way pretty stealthily through the floor of an office building, if the low profile were maintained, and so that it only moved when no one was looking. Neat, but I just don't see it physically actuating to do any task besides vacuuming and pushing on objects.