[Yaaarc] Website, Roomba & Stuff

[Paul Haas]

On Sun, 21 May 2006, Neal Probert wrote:

> Roomba
> ------
> I have a Roomba, that I got from an ex-girlfriend.  It doesn't work, so we 
> could try to fix it at the next meeting.  If not, it's available for 
> dissection.

We opened it up looked around.  We put it back together.

We hooked up a 12 volt battery.  Smoke came out.  We used another website 
and corrected the polarity.  No more smoke.

We ran it off a 12V battery and noticed it could only go for a few seconds 
before the voltage drop made it shutdown.

We tried 18 volts, and it worked briefly then did the "circle dance 
followed by 4 beeps".  Google said we needed to clean it.  We blasted it 
with compressed air.  It worked off of the 18volts.

The battery only produced 1.7 volts. We goosed the battery with a 12V gel 
cell for a few seconds. This brought it up to 9 volts for long enough to 
make the built in charger happy. We charged it for a reasonable fraction 
of an hour and set it loose in the bathroom.

It did the spiral cleaning action until it bumped into something, then it 
started randomly wandering around.  It got under the cabinet and managed 
to get out again.

It's battery didn't last very long, so we put it back on the charger.  The 
charger is 500ma.  The battery is rated at 3,000ma hours, so it should 
take something well in excess of of 6 hours for a full charge.  The 
battery will never be like new, but the Roomba seems to work now.

It seems to work, but we made the mistake of putting it back together 
before cleaning it.  There are probably areas that need more cleaning.

Neal, mind if I "test it" further on my living room floor? I want to see 
how our cats react.

For your googling pleasure, this is a a Roomba Pro.  You can see how 
people have hacked them.
--
Paul Haas
paulh at Hamjudo.com