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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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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...
Can't wait to read about the first dead burglar.
switching it from suck, to blow.
Spaceballs rules btw.
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.'
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.
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.
How about several Roombas playing musical accompaniment to Drunk animatronic Walmart Santa?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
How long before some doofus tries to reenact Great Moments in Cinema?
Standard use on hardwood floors. And I do not have children or dogs for that matter. What model do you own? I purchased the Discovery SE and I am certainly not the only one experiencing this - a quick search on roombareview can confirm this.
So yeah, I still think they are crap.
Hmmmm....I have an "original Roomba" from when there was only one model, and I recently picked up a Discovery SE. Searching the Roombareview.com forum I find a few people complaining of bad sucker motors and erratic behavior with the Discovery, but the biggest complaint seems to be slow turnaround on warranty returns from iRobot. I haven't noticed any problems yet with my new roomba, but I've only had it a couple months...
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
"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).
Damn you, man, you pay to fill the bong?! Grow your own, share, and use the saved money to get a bong caddy!
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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....
At work the other day, the bad-joke-of-the-day was similar.
In lots of hotels, motel, inn, etc there are signs that indicate someone famous slept there. "Elvis slept here." "King Charles II slept here."
In a small inn in Germany there is a similar sign. "Heisenberg may have slept here."
It served as a very good geek test. People either immediately laughed, or just looked blankly waiting for the punchline.
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.
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.