Page 107 - Hacking Roomba

88 Part I — Interfacing

Summary

The BlueSMiRF adapter is an awesome hacker toy that you no doubt have ideas for using
elsewhere in your house. Rumor is that the cost of Bluetooth serial adapters like BlueSMiRF
will become extremely cheap soon. Having a Bluetooth device that acts like a simple serial port
makes it a breeze to hack together gadgets that talk wirelessly to your computer. Using RXTX
you’ve seen how serial port access from Java works and how it’s really not that bad, especially
if you’ve done serial port programming in C. Plus, coding in RXTX enables your serial port
code to work on just about any operating system out there. Although the current state of
RoombaComm doesn’t enable you to do much with Roomba, you can no doubt see how to
expand the code to incorporate more ROI commands.
With both a serial tether for debugging purposes and a wireless adapter for showing off, you
can now develop custom Roomba software and use your computer to control your Roomba
from all over the house.