Home
Roomba Rampage (Olivier Proulx) Mac OS

Roomba Rampage (Olivier Proulx) Mac OS

June 01 2021

Roomba Rampage (Olivier Proulx) Mac OS

It’s hard to find people who have not heard of the Roomba vacuum cleaner. iRobot provides a number of Roomba vacuums to choose from but the Roomba i7+ is definitely the most impressive piece of tech. Imagine a Robot vacuum that not only cleans a home’s floor and specific rooms by name but automatically empties itself. Here is the Roomba i7+ vacuum cleaner launched by iRobot that brings a new level of automation to robotic vacuum cleaners. iRobot’s Roomba i7+ comes with the ability to learn, map and remember a home’s floor plan to automatically clean your house. Therefore, it is easy to cleaning your home now with this new robot vacuum. Also, you just need to perform the irobot roomba i7+ wifi setup. If we talk about the design of the Roomba i7+ robot vacuum then it has completely different look unlike other Roomba vacuums. The home base of i7+ is taller and offers a ramp style docking pad. Other impressive thing about this device is that it sucks the debris from the dustbin into a disposable bag within the home base charging station.

A aa aaa aaaa aaacn aaah aaai aaas aab aabb aac aacc aace aachen aacom aacs aacsb aad aadvantage aae aaf aafp aag aah aai aaj aal aalborg aalib aaliyah aall aalto aam. Share real-time maps of iRobot Roomba 960, 965, 966 and 980 missions. Spot clean from the app.

Roomba Rampage (olivier Proulx) Mac Os Download

The iRobot’s Roomba i7+ includes:

  • A charging home base with built in dustbin
  • Two Disposal bags
  • One Virtual wall
  • One HEPA filter
  • One Spinning brush

The performance of the Roomba i7+ is excellent and brings some great new features in a great way. Now, let’s have a look at some special features of the Roomba i7+.

Note:
This post is pretty old and I’ve been continuing work on Roomba software.
Note:
For a more readable take on this, see this Makezine artcicle

Fun farm slots. A week ago I got my OSMO//hacker Roomba firmware updater from iRobot. It worked like a charm, giving me a serial port to fully control the Roomba.

An interface was needed however, since the crazy mini-DIN 7-pin on the Roomba is very unstandard. So the first attempt at a robust interface between a Roomba and a standard PC serial port is my Roomba Serial Interface:

The Roomba Serial Connector
It seems people are confused by the mini-DIN 7-pin connector, citing difficulties in obtaining that specific plug. It turns out that mini-DIN 8-pin plugs will mechanically mate with the 7-pin jacks, with the center key hole in the 7-pin female jack taking the middel pin of the 8-pin plug. Mac high-speed serial cables from the 1990’s work great for this, and I have a ton of those from all my misspent youth doing MIDI on a Mac. So chop up those old Mac serial cables! If you can’t find one, Jameco will sell you one for $3.29.

The PC Serial Connector
Some computers have an RS-232 serial port. Most don’t. To hook this serial interface cable up to your Mac or other modern computer without an RS-232 port, use a Keyspan High Speed USB Serial Adapter. Supported on all platforms and the choice of Mac hardware-hackers worldwide.

Step-by-Step Construction details
If you’d like to build your own interface but don’t quite know where to start, I took a few images of the process I used.

The Software
With the Keyspan adapter and the Roomba Serial Interface, all the hardware is present to control the Roomba from a computer. All that’s required is software that can connect to serial ports and send and receive binary data. The Roomba SCI protocol isn’t text-based, so you can’t really use a normal terminal program like ZTerm (Mac) or HyperTerminal (PC).

My goal was to create a program that allowed one to remotely control all aspects of Roomba functionality as well as getting all information from the Roomba’s sensors. https://casino-free-hollywood-slots-jgi-casino-promotions.peatix.com.

It would be nice if the worked on multiple platforms. While I initially started in C, the difficulties in non-programmers getting C code to work on many platforms made me leery of that choice. And C doesn’t provide a consistent GUI framework on multiple systems. It turns out that Java has pretty good serial port functionality now (provided by RXTX), and Processing provides a good cross-platform environment for writing graphical Java programs.

I created a Roomba communication API in Java and a GUI in Processing that shows a top-down iconic view of the Roomba universe. The API is called “RoombaComm” and the GUI is called:

RoombaComm_tst

It provides the following capabilities:

  • Detect a Roomba and display Roomba status
  • Remotely control the Roomba like a little tank
  • Read and display bump, wheeldrop, cliff and dirt sensors
  • Display angle and velocity data from the Roomba both numerically and iconically
  • Start and stop vacuum on the Roomba
  • Play notes on the Roomba using the computer keyboard as a musical keyboard
  • Display Roomba button press status
Roomba rampage (olivier proulx) mac os pro

The software is still very rough and not very well structured nor documented. However if you have a Roomba serial interface and want to play with it, it can be downloaded at:

(olivier

Trying it out
American airlines 1344. In the zip file above, there are executables for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. I’ve only tried the OS X one. Give one of them a try and see if it works for you. If not…

To use it inside of Processing:

Roomba Rampage (olivier Proulx) Mac Os 7

  1. Download and install Processing
  2. In the Processing document folder (“Documents/Processing” on Mac or “My Documents/Processing” on PC), unzip the above zipfile. It should create a directory called “roombacomm_tst”
  3. Launch Processing and choose File->Sketchbook->roombacomm_tst to open the program
  4. Click the Play icon to compile and start the program
  5. RoombaComm_tst will then give you a list of serial ports, pick the serial port that you’ve plugged the Roomba in to. On Mac OS X, there are both “/dev/cu.blahblah” and “/dev/tty.blahblah” serial ports. Always choose the “/dev/cu.blahblah” ports. On PCs, it will be whatever COM port number you’ve selected. On my Mac, the Keyspan adapter is “/dev/cu.KeySerial1” and on my PC, the Keyspan adapter is “COM6”.
  6. RoombaComm_tst will open that serial port and attempt to talk to the Roomba. If it is not successful, it will display “status: no roomba”.
  7. If it’s succesful, drive the Roomba around with the arrow keys, play tunes with the “asdf…” keys and so on!

Here’s what it looks like when just playing around:

Roomba Rampage (olivier Proulx) Mac Os Update

Let me know if you try this out and give me feedback on how it works for you.

Roomba Rampage (olivier Proulx) Mac Os Catalina

Update: Two up casino.

Roomba Rampage (Olivier Proulx) Mac OS

Leave a Reply

Cancel reply