Page 80 - Hacking Roomba

Chapter 3 — Building a Roomba Serial Interface Tether 61

program written with the RoombaComm Java library that you’ll be creating in the next few
chapters and which was introduced at the end of Chapter 2. Normally Java programs don’t act
like double-clickable applications, but there exists wrapper software to bundle up a Java pro-
gram into a format your OS will see as a real application. You’ll get into how to make these
later. If you’d like to get a head start on how to write Java programs, see the sidebar about it in
Chapter 5.

FIGURE 3-19: RoombaCommTest on Mac OS X

Choose the same serial port as you chose for the echo test and click connect. Messages will
appear in the display area giving the results of the connect attempt. If all goes well, you’ll see
Roomba connected, and Roomba will beep.

On Mac OS X and Linux, the serial port may appear twice: once as a /dev/cu.something port
and again as a /dev/tty.something. If it appears twice, choose the /dev/cu version of the port.

On Mac OS X, you may need to run the macosx_setup_command script contained in the
RoombaCommTest directory. This makes a few minor changes that enable the Java serial library
RXTX to work. A future version of the RXTX library used in RoombaCommTest will not need this
setup command. You can still run the command if you want; it won’t harm anything.