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Chapter 15 — RoombaCam: Adding Eyes to Roomba 357

Building a USB Serial Tether from a Phone Sync Cable Continued

FIGURE 15-16: The finished dongle

The NSLU2 is a low-cost network storage device from Linksys, sort of like the Asus WL-HDD. The
NSLU2-Linux hackers use the sync cables to connect to the internal serial ports on the NSLU2,
which are very similar to the two internal serial ports on the WRTSL54GS. They’ve documented
not just how to use Cable 22, but all the USB sync cables available from Radio Shack. If you
have other OpenWrt-capable routers, you can use one of these sync cables to connect to these
internal serial ports and have a serial console login to OpenWrt.

Plugging All the Devices Together

Thanks to a tiny USB travel hub, all the devices can fit in small box, as in Figure 15-17, show-
ing a test fitting. The small box can hold the battery pack if you don’t want to power everything
off the robot. In Figure 15-17, the box was a small wooden gift box covered in black duct tape
to give it extra strength and add a bit of grippiness. In one wall of the box, a slit was cut with a
Dremel to allow the cables to pass through.