Page 240 - Hacking Roomba

Chapter 11 — Connecting Roomba to the Internet 221

To power the SitePlayer Telnet box you can either plug it in normally with its wall wart or
fashion a power plug from an old DC adapter. If you recall, the SitePlayer Telnet box uses a
standard 7805 voltage regulator, so it can handle the 16 VDC from the Roomba. You could
fashion a good reusable connector if you plan on using the SitePlayer Telnet System box in this
configuration, or you could do what was in Figure 11-12 and create a simple power tap. If
you’ve built your own SitePlayer Telnet Roomba adapter circuit, as in Figure 11-13, you don’t
have to worry about power problems because the circuit has its own voltage regulator and taps
the Roomba battery in the standard way via the Mini-DIN 8-pin plug.

FIGURE 11-13: SitePlayer Telnet Roomba adapter hooked up to Roomba

If you know how to write network programs, you can immediately start sending ROI com-
mands to Roomba by connecting to the telnet port (port 23) on the SitePlayer Telnet. As a
quick experiment, try sending the byte sequence 0x80,0x82,0x86 (with 100msec pauses in
between), and Roomba should start doing a spot clean. For example, if you have Perl and net-
cat (nc) on your system, you could do this:
% perl -e ‘@b=(0x80,0x82,0x86); for(@b){ printf(“%c”,$b);sleep(1);
}’ \
| nc 192.168.0.147 23

The little Perl program outputs the bytes with a one-second delay between them, and netcat
connects the Perl program to your Roomba’s SPT.