I set out this weekend to get an Arduino board to control my Roomba. (The Roomba has a great – and generally open – interface, and iRobot deserves significant credit for encouraging creative repurposing/extensions of their products.) I’ve got a few project ideas in mind, but for an initial step just wanted to verify that the Arduino could a) send control commands (“move forward”, “turn right”, etc.) from the Arduino, and b) read sensor data (“something is touching my left bumper”, “I’m about to fall down the stairs”). This post contains my notes, which hopefully will help others doing this sort through some of the issues in a bit less time than that I spent. Continue reading »
Mar 262008
I’ve been playing with Arduino boards in my limited spare time over the past few months. It’s a fun way to spend quality hands-on geek time that is clearly distinct (at least to me) from my day job. Plus, I’m able to start actually instantiating some of the ubiquitious computing / distributed sensor ideas that have been floating around in my head.
I’ve been working on a simple wireless light, temp, and motion sensor. Light was a trivial CDS photocell connected to the analog port of the arduino. My first attempt at temp is using the Dallas Semiconductor DS-18B20 digital one-wire sensor, which is pretty slick for $4.25.
There was some good sample code on the main arduino site, but I spent a small bit of time to flesh it out more completely, adding the ability to configure sensor resolution and extracting the temp value from the returned data. Code is here, if this is interesting or useful to you.
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