Projects/DJ Roomba

Idea

After discussion with CuppaMatt about the Roomba sat on the shelving, currently unused, he suggested the idea of DJ Roomba. A Roomba with ipod dock (or speakers) on top, and other accessories. Mow

Implementation

The plan is to at least have an arduino sat on top, quite possibly in some kind of custom designed control PCB, with interfaces to a Raspberry Pi (would be good) and possibly an nRF24L01 (this could be sat on the Pi side of things for more control). Of course, speakers & an amplifier plus a multitude of LEDs would be a requirement.

Batteries

Not sure if the Roomba battery is completely dead. A check on Saturday seemed to confirm that it would take a charge, but it takes around 16 hours to fully charge from flat so would need leaving on for quite some time. Failing that, the batteries could be replaced with something such as a lipo pack either soldered to the existing contacts, or interfaced with a board that then sits in the battery bay.

• If the battery input on the Roomba could tolerate around 17VDC, this would make it incredibly convenient to use a 4S lipo pack, such as this (would need a protection circuit of course.)

Hardware

• Roomba
• LED Strip
• Arduino
• Audio hardware (speakers, class D amplifier)
• Raspberry Pi 2 (would be nice, 2 probably because compute power would be needed if doing image recognition)
• nRF24L01 (would be nice)
• Camera (Kinect possibly, or just some kind of high quality USB webcam)

Progress!

• 13/02/16 got an Arduino Mega talking to the Roomba using the Roomba library. It plays a tune, hoorah!