Text Your Roomba

Inspiration

We were looking for fun/interesting hacks that we could do with our Roomba, and we decided it may be useful to control the roomba from our phones.

What it does

The hack allows users to send text messages containing commands for their Roomba, and receive text messages from the roomba with its status information. Commands include taking a picture with the webcam, receiving sensor data, battery levels, etc, and starting/stopping cleaning.

How we built it

We connected a raspberry pi's serial pins to the serial port of the Roomba, and we run a flask webserver on the pi to receive commands and send information using the twlio API

Challenges we ran into

It's hard getting a raspberry pi working with a Roomba (voltage issues, figuring out how to get the serial interface on the pi).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to get the pi hooked up to the Roomba,

What we learned

We learned about the twlio api, and about serial interfaces.

What's next for Text Your Roomba

we'd like to extend the functionality to include more things like adding other sensors to the roomba, allowing the user to control the movement of the Roomba, and so on.