Roominations on the Roomba
I have a Roomba. Hal Arthur is, in fact, the most useful gadget I’ve ever acquired, and I have had a lot of gadgets over the years. Ironically, it’s the most useful gadget most anyone would have, if they were willing to give it a chance. Yes, Roombas install themselves as members of the family quite quickly, and as such near demand to be named. I was a skeptic until I saw one in action – an old 4th generation that you can’t even get this side of eBay.
The Roomba is not just a robotic vacuum that deftly navigates my house while eviscerating dust-bunnies, eradicating hundreds-of-miles of girl-hair, hoarding vast oceans of bird feathers and seed husks, scarfing up long-lost receipts under my bed, and pushing a long-lost fork out from under my couch…. DAILY… Nay, it is in fact a development platform openly accessible and encouraged by the manufacturer! How many hardware companies encourage you to take apart and build upon their technologies? Without voiding the warranty?
You can build a serial interface, bluetooth interface, gamepad interface, Wiimote interface, cellphone interface … and you can buy the vast majority of those via third-parties if you value time over money, or suck with a soldering iron. iRobot provides (free) documentation on the SCI and some sample code to get developers started, and from there the possibilities are really endless. I have some gumstix gear on order after successfully prototyping some onboard control systems over a serial cable, which will essentially add a WiFi-accessible Linux computer directly into the chassis, and fully able to control the Roomba (more to come on that project)… Possibilities include tying in GPS, cameras (ala motion sensing), infrared, scheduling, adaptive behavior, etc.
Friend: People are morons and anyone who buys a Roomba in specific.
Me: You know I own a Roomba, right?
Friend: I did not.
While I never resorted to name-calling, I was skeptical of their value or utility for quite a while until experience and research brushed it aside and I took iRobot up on a 30-day trial. I won’t be sending it back. I’m happily a moron who hasn’t had to vacuum- yet still has near-spotless, practically no-maintenance carpets, rugs, and hardwood floors- in a loooong time.
2 Comments
Other Links to this Post
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
By Earthceuticals, April 6, 2008 @ 5:49 pm
I think maybe if you had a small place or at least not much stuff around, no kids or pets… these might be alright. We had a friend get one and originally thought it was great too, except it had a very small dust reservoir apparently which needed to be emptied a lot. They had a large house, a lot of stuff kids and two large dogs. I didn’t know about the programming interfaces, sounds like it’s probably good just as a high tech toy.
By Steve Major, April 13, 2008 @ 7:22 pm
To the above commenter, we have a fairly large place, 2 kids, and an 80 pound pile of hair that I think contains a dog within it.
Our 500 series is getting the job done quite well after an initial period of running it twice a day. The thing to keep in mind is that a Roomba cleans not only where you have with your regular vacuum, but a ton of places that you rarely get to. As such, those first runs will get a lot of grime simply because it’s getting in places you can’t or don’t always get to.