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Wii Tennis And A Roomba

It’s been quite a while since I’ve written here but I have been plenty busy with packing, moving, unpacking plus the daily grind on top of that.

But all work and no play makes me a dull boy — that’s where the Wii helps. I was in a race with Chris at work to see who could accumulate > 2000 points in Wii Tennis. On Sunday night I won a game which put me at 2011 points. Just enough to edge Chris out before he could get there, but he’ll stick to his story that he had tennis elbow and couldn’t play as often as I could.

On Tuesday this week Lauren and I picked up a vacuum cleaner from Canadian Tire. It’s a Roomba Discovery created by iRobot. iRobot is a robotics company that just happens to have a hugely successful robotic vacuum. From the outside it looks like a pretty neat company with some very interesting software challenges.

Now for the neat part. You can control the roomba’s motors and read the sensors through the serial port. There is a published serial port (hardware) hack that puts a Bluetooth radio onboard the device which allows the radio to connect to any other Bluetooth device that can talk the serial port protocol. Now I need to build some hardware so I can write some software.

http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/02/how_to_roomba_bluetooth_interf.html

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 at 8:08 pm and is filed under Geek, Hardware, Software, Wii. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

4 Responses to “Wii Tennis And A Roomba”

  1. Baron Says:
    April 4th, 2007 at 8:33 am

    So, if you write crappy code, you’d end up with a crappy carpet? Typical geek… Will live in his own filth as long as he can hack.

  2. Nesser Says:
    April 4th, 2007 at 8:57 am

    My carpets are way cleaner than if I did it myself. It attempts to cover every square inch 4 times in a cleaning session. When the robot is drained of batteries or finished the room it docks to recharge and then completes the “mission” or goes to sleep. Very neat.

    Any software I write would run on a “base station” computer and be communicated to the roomba who will obey my commands (insert evil laugh here). All the embedded software remains and I can still go over and push the “clean” button and watch the device bump around a room using it’s own Lisp based (I think) cleaning algorithms. The communication specifications are very well documented – which is a pleasant surprise when it comes to software API’s.

    http://www.irobot.com/images/consumer/hacker/Roomba_SCI_Spec_Manual.pdf

    It’s ironic the similarities between the roomba and the lego mindstorm project we did for thesis. I should have applied to iRobot right out of school, now I’ve forgotten all my wall following and path generating algorithms.

  3. Jen Says:
    April 9th, 2007 at 9:49 am

    A robotic vacuum. Funny how when I showed Rich he loved it…
    ***HUGE EYE ROLL***
    LOL
    Chris, you never cease to amaze me, or amuse me

  4. darryl Says:
    May 10th, 2007 at 9:15 am

    http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/feature-top-5-roomba-hacks

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