Roomba Progress, 3/2/09

Last week I did some more testing, cut a hole in the Roomba’s circuit board housing, reassembled the whole thing (removing some unnecessary brushes and vacuum-related parts) so I can run the wheel motors without worrying about disturbing the electronics.

From there, I moved back to the Roomba’s onboard computer.  For weeks it has been powered by a generic ATX supply which means it could only use AC wall power.  I wired its so-far-unused OPUS DC-to-DC supply to a 12V bench supply and had some intermittent success–it would work for about 15 minutes at a time after which I assume the 12V supply overheated, though everything was fine again after it cooled off.  In an effort to provide better DC power, I cut the cord of an old 18V laptop supply and wired it to the OPUS.  The laptop supply stays cool and allows the computer to run indefinitely.  This should be useful for powering the computer when the Roomba battery is in the charger, so I hope to attach matching power plugs to the laptop supply and the battery terminals and put a power jack on the OPUS so that I can quickly swap supplies.  I’m also brainstorming ways of “hot-swapping” the supplies so I can place the computer on AC power without shutting it down.

Hole in PCB housing.

Close-up of hole.

PCB in place, but not yet assembled.

My final step was to get my debug program to run on the Roomba’s computer and add a “manual mode” that allows me to easily drive it around with the arrow keys.  I’m now able to boot up the computer without attaching a display or keyboard, SSH into its ad-hoc wireless network and drive it around. See the video below.

TO DO:

• Wire the OPUS supply to the battery
• Securely mount the supply, computer, and breadboard to the Roomba
• [Possibly] integrate plugs and jacks into the power wiring
• Move ahead with Lisp, SNePs, cameras, and OpenCV

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