[Yaaarc] Website, Roomba & Stuff

[Neal Probert]

I wonder where the smoke came out from?

Yes, by all means test it at home.

Great job on the battery.  Let me know how it charges up.  Googling 
around, the batteries cost about $50. 

On eBay, the thing itself is worth up to $70.

But it may be worth the fun just hacking it.

Paul Haas wrote:

> 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



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