Page 224 - Hacking Roomba

Connecting Roomba chapter

to the Internet

he objects in our homes are becoming smart. Not just the obvious
ones like the TV and stereo, but also the more mundane ones like the
Tstove and vacuum cleaner. The “smart home” movement of a decade
ago with its centralized house computer is giving way to the emergent phe-
nomena of all the little parts of our homes becoming smart.
in this chapter
If you have a Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, you’re already aware of this.
Roomba has more computing power than large corporations could afford in About Ethernet
the 1960s. Imagine what bits of disposable computing will be present in our
everyday devices a few decades from now.
Choosing the right
A smart object is useful, but as anyone who has used the Internet can attest embedded Net
to, connecting smart objects with each other leads to entirely new and device
higher-level interactions. This network effect characteristic is so important,
it’s considered a field of study in and of itself. The effect has long been
recognized (no one will go to a stock exchange with only a few traders, and Building an Ethernet
a phone company with 10 users isn’t nearly as useful as one with 10,000 adapter
users), but it took computers and the Internet to bring it into sharp focus.
Network effects can apply to any aspect of a group that becomes more effi- Using the SitePlayer
cient or useful when a higher percentage of the group participates. Telnet

We do not yet live in a world where a large percentage of the objects in our
lives are smart and networked, but we are on the brink. Often with network Using the Lantronix
effects, once a critical mass of participants has been reached, all others in XPort
the group quickly follow suit. A recent example of this is e-mail: Before
1990 it seemed like no one had it, and then just a few years later suddenly Updating
everyone did.
RoombaComm
Right now, only certain household objects are smart, and even fewer are for network use
networked. Recent advances in networking allow even the simplest smart
device to communicate with others and to do it cheaply. This chapter dis-
cusses two of those types of devices that enable networking via Ethernet.

Why Ethernet?

Both RS-232 and Bluetooth turn Roomba into a kind of networked object,
but a subservient one. Objects communicating through simple serial proto-
cols like those two require a computer translator to convert between the
TCP/IP protocol used on the Internet and the simpler serial port protocol.