A Fully Programmable Mobile Robot

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Tuesday January 9, 2007 @10:21AM from the aye,-robot dept.

paxmaniac writes "iRobot has announced Create: a new fully programmable mobile robot based on the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner. People have been hacking the Roomba since the day it came out. Well, hacking just got a whole lot easier. A command module for the Create provides a programmable 8-bit Atmel micro controller, four DB-9 ports for your own sensors, and a number of sample programs that can be compiled and uploaded to the command module via USB. Botmag has more details and some cool applications. This looks like the perfect robotics platform for hobbyists, schools, and universities alike."

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Re:Perfect platform? Really? by EmbeddedJanitor · 2007-01-09 10:53 · Score: 3, Interesting

Agreed. The NXT is great. I've been doing some hacking to get Lejos running on NXT http://users.actrix.co.nz/manningc/lejos_nxt.jpg . This is now at alpha stage (code on sourceforge).
Having the hardware specs (schematics etc) has been great. I started this effort before Lego released the firmware and have not used that.
The NXT has a pretty grunt CPU and is capable of much more than a Roomba. Designing and adding 3rd party sensors is a breeze.

--
Engineering is the art of compromise.