Hack that Roomba

Image: Stephanie Gower

Stephanie's Roomba has taken over her living room and is adored like a pet.

I recently got a Roomba – one of those disc-shaped contraptions that whirrs around the living room sucking up dirt all on its own. I think it’s amazing – it runs around the place looking under couches for lost socks and cleans up spilled crumbs and pet hair. It stops to concentrate on areas it thinks are especially dirty, and it’s sensible enough not to throw itself down the stairs. It calculates the size of each room, makes a map of it and figures out when it’s done cleaning. Heck, it vacuums the whole apartment and I don’t have to do a thing.

Roomba’s pretty sophisticated. Made by a company called iRobot, who also design much fancier machines that search tunnels and caves for booby traps and dispose of unexploded bombs in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, it incorporates a whole suite of software to help it navigate. Still, I’d never have believed that a vacuum cleaner could be a hacker’s dream device.

Since October 2005, every Roomba comes with an interface that allows access to its software. Clever hackers have installed Bluetooth adaptors on their Roombas and taught them to respond to commands from cell phones and the new Nintendo Wii remotes. The kids over at My Room Bud sell Roomba costumes and provide an upload to make it hop like a frog or roar like a tiger before it starts to clean. More paranoid types can follow Popular Science’s instructions to get their Roomba to patrol the home when nobody’s there, snapping photos and uploading them to Flickr – with help from a webcam, a tablet PC, and presumably, some good strong Velcro. There’s even a new book called Hacking Roomba, which explains how to get started and has fun sections like, “Making a Roomba Sing”.

My favorite hack? The three Roombas who are still Christmas caroling over at todbot.com using MIDI tunes and programmed motions.

Stephanie’s hoping that robots never come to take over the world, since apparently all they’ll have to do to win her over is a bit of housekeeping.

Fun Links:

Cylon Roombas: C’mon, you know that this is how the Cylons really got started.

El expert who wrote el Book has a blog: HackingRoomba.com

Crazy Roomba Hacking Overload: Someone programs their Roomba to match the actions of a simple Roomba video game that someone else made. Really. It’s too much. Check it out here.