

iRobot Roomba Serial Command Interface Specification [pdf] - omnibrain
http://www.irobot.com/images/consumer/hacker/roomba_sci_spec_manual.pdf

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mng2
Having worked with Roomba SCI a while back, a few things come to mind. First
is a lack of integrity checking. The default baud rate of 57600 is too high
(at least for the 6-ft mini-DIN cables we could find), and it's really
annoying when your Roomba goes careening off in a weird direction because your
command got corrupted. Thankfully the baud rate can be reduced, but there
really ought to be something in the next layer to check integrity, as the
Roomba firmware is a black box.

Also, it's kinda obvious in retrospect, but Roombas were not designed to drive
in straight lines. Which can be annoying if you want to use them as a robotics
platform.

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elstevo
Their competition Neato has, in my opinion, a more interesting platform to
hack on, mostly due to the fact that the device has a LIDAR sensor on top.

[http://www.neatorobotics.com/resources/programmersmanual_201...](http://www.neatorobotics.com/resources/programmersmanual_20140305.pdf)
[http://xv11hacking.wikispaces.com/](http://xv11hacking.wikispaces.com/)

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dildog
I was going to crack a "Roombaduino in 3..2..1.." joke but it turns out there
is already a library for this:
[http://www.airspayce.com/mikem/arduino/Roomba/](http://www.airspayce.com/mikem/arduino/Roomba/)
(-:

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dotjosh
[https://github.com/dotjosh/iRobot.NET](https://github.com/dotjosh/iRobot.NET)
I wrote one a while back as well, if you are using .net

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mharsch
the cool kids are all using
[https://www.npmjs.org/package/roomba](https://www.npmjs.org/package/roomba)

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gcb0
this is hackerold not hacker news

