Page 385 - Hacking Roomba

366 Part III — More Complex Interfacing

can duplicate and improve upon their efforts. And if you don’t want to build your own add-ons,
there are companies that will sell you programmable ones. Already mentioned are the upcom-
ing RooStamp and RooAVR from RoombaDevTools.com, allowing you to program Roomba
with a Basic Stamp or an AVR chip, respectively.

Roomba Mind Control by Element Direct

http://elementdirect.com/

Another commercial microcontroller product that is very interesting is the Roomba Mind
Control from Element Direct. The Mind Control consists of two components: a code stick
that plugs into Roomba and a code stick programmer. The code stick is an extremely tiny
AVR microcontroller housed in a cylindrical shell as big as the Mini-DIN connector of the
Roomba ROI port. It is virtually invisible when plugged into Roomba. Figure 16-1 shows
what it looks like.

FIGURE 16-1: Roomba Mind Control microcontroller code stick
plugged into the Roomba Discovery model

The programmer is a small board powered and controlled via USB. Figure 16-2 shows the pro-
grammer with a code stick plugged into it and being programmed. The currently Windows-only
software used to program the code stick is derived from the same AVR GCC that is used in
Arduino, so it’s conceivable that Arduino or any other AVR GCC-based programming envi-
ronment could work with the Mind Control.