Page 391 - Hacking Roomba

372 Part III — More Complex Interfacing

Build Your Own Costume

If you’re handy with a needle and thread, you can build your own Roomba costume. Liz
Goodman has posted a great step-by-step guide on Instructables about how to make a
furry mouse costume out of fake fur and pink felt. The pattern shown can be assembled
with a sewing machine or hand-stitched. Liz’s site is:
http://www.instructables.com/id/ESYFHPW859EP286VS4/

The pattern is pretty simple and even if you have no sewing experience you can make it.
You can also modify it to match some of the new algorithms and behaviors you’ve created
from previous chapters. For example, make a bug costume. With pipe cleaners for anten-
nae and shimmery insect-like fabric, it would be the perfect companion to the roach brain
you created in Chapter 13.
You could also use the myRoomBud costumes but design your own behaviors for your
Roomba. Get the ladybug costume and have your Roomba flit around your houseplants. (A
green filter in front a light sensor lets you detect plants just like NASA satellites do.) Another
idea is to send the frog to the bug zapper on the porch at night to get dinner. For both of
these ideas you would need to modify the Roach code from Chapter 13 to make it go
toward light rather than away from it. If your bug zapper isn’t very bright, you could add a
microphone and tune the code to listen for the zaps it makes.
Alternatively, create a little butler outfit for it and put lights or remote control code emitters
on the fridge. Program Roomba to go find the light or emitter to fetch you a drink from the
fridge. A simple servo-driven gripper could be added to the top of the robot and controlled
by a Basic Stamp or Arduino.

Roomba APIs and Applications

The RoombaComm API you’ve worked with in this book’s projects is just one example of how
to communicate with the Roomba, and not a very advanced one at that. You’ve seen from the
microcontroller code and the various incarnations of “roombacmd” on Linux that any language
can be used to build a Roomba controlling library.

RoombaFX/Roomba Terminal

http://sourceforge.net/projects/roombafx
http://sourceforge.net/projects/roomba-term

RoombaFX is a C# framework by Kevin Gabbert for Roomba interfacing. If you’re a Microsoft
.NET user, then RoombaFX is for you. RoombaFX provides both high-level and low-level
access to Roomba through well-designed C# objects.