Tuesday, February 2

Vacuum? No, Tonight We Go To War Against the Dust Mite

For those of us lucky enough to own a Roomba, it makes taking care of dust in your house a breeze — but it could be better. Which is why [Marcel] spent his weekend upgrading his Roomba — or should we say, Doomba.

He started out with modest intentions. What’s stopping his Roomba from going a bit faster? He was pretty sure he could crank up the output a little bit. Donning his white lab coat and safety glasses, he set out do upgrade this little bot into something much more formidable.

12 hours later he slipped back into a conscious reality. Not only had he upgraded his Roomba, he had turned it into a mini war machine — the Doomba.

The upgraded bot features a UE BoomBox allowing him to play Flight of the Valkeries as he descends on his helpless dust-mite prey. Remote control features are now accessible using a Playstation 2 wireless dongle and Arduino. A Raspberry Pi allows for webcam recording and WiFi capabilities — specifically for the remote triggering of tasks. He even threw on a bank of capacitors in a hacky fix to prevent brownouts from the SPI port.

As long as Roombas have been around, people have been modifying them to suit other purposes — heck, even the company Roomba itself released a hackable version!


Filed under: robots hacks

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