This robot was built to care for the graves and honor the dead in the Jewish tradition. It is called “Stoney” and was developed by [Zvika Markfeld] based on a concept by [Itamar Shimshony] who is working toward an MFA degree. The image above shows it in action as part of an installation; to our knowledge it has not been used for actual grave sites. But the concept is not a joke; it’s something that makes the observers think.

The base of the robot is an iRobot Roomba on top of which is built a platform for a robot arm. The arm has easy access to two palettes, one holds small stones, and the other flowers. There is also a small box which holds a rag. It navigates around the grave, placing stones, flowers, and using the rag and a water dispenser to symbolically clean the headstone. All of this is controlled by an Arduino Mega board which controls another Arduino running the arm, as well as the microcontroller in the Roomba.

The details of the ritual, as well as the components of the robot are well explained in the clip after the break.

In addition to getting a haircut, [Dino] spent his week editing an old video of him tearing down a Roomba 4000. These robots can be picked up for just a few dollars on eBay, making them one of the cheapest bodged up robotics dev platforms available.

After [Dino] goes over how to unscrew the cover and disassemble the Roomba 4000, he goes over the layout of the motherboard and takes a look at the sensors. The wheels on the Roomba are actually very neat pieces of technology with a very cool planetary gear system that is the perfect drive system for your next robot build.

There are a ton of ways to use the electronics in Roombas for a few interesting robotics projects. [Dino] built 2/3rds of a all terrain rocker bogie robot – just like the Curiosity rover – out of a Roomba, and a small two wheeled indoor robot using a Parallax Propeller. If you’re a redditor there’s always the possibility of building a Doomba, but we think [Patrick] has a better idea than a knife strapped to a vacuum cleaner.

As always, [Dino]‘s vidia after the break.

It figures. You spend a ton of time making a cool set of costumes and then you can’t get your kid to pose for a picture. It’s okay though, we still get the point. This themed set of costumes dresses the little one as a Roomba vacuuming robot while mom and dad are suited up as virtual walls (modules that are used to keep the bot from falling down stairs, etc.). It’s fun and unique, but had it not been for some additional electronics this would have been relegated to a links post. For safety sake each costume was outfitted with a ring of LEDs. As a challenge, the lights were given the ability to sync up patterns with each other.

Each costume has a circular frame at the top with a set of RGB LED strings attached. To get them to display synchronized patterns an IR transmitter/receiver board was designed and ordered from OSHPark. Each costume has four of these modules so no matter where the wearers are facing it should not break communications. A demo of the synchronized light rings can be seen after the break

Running a data center takes a lot of work, and even making sure the ambient temperature for hundreds of boxes is in the proper range is an arduous task. When faced with the prospect of installing hundreds of temperature sensors in an EMC data center, [Vivek] had a better idea: put just a few sensors on a robot and drive around the racks. With the right software, it’s a breeze to automate the process and build a near real-time temperature monitoring solution for a huge data center.

The data center robot is based on a iRobot Create, basically a Roomba without a vacuum. Attached to the robot is a netbook, Arduino, and a PVC mast housing three temperature sensors and a USB webcam.

Using the floor of the data center for navigation, the robot canvasses the racks sending temperature data back to a server via WiFi. From there, the temperatures can be graphed to make sure the racks aren’t too hot or too cold.

You can check out a video of the robot in action after the break.

The great thing about hacking on Roombas is that iRobot used quality parts to build them. [Jason] got his hands on a broken 5XX series Roomba and posted an article about how he reused the salvaged parts.

What you see above is one of the results of his work. This little bot takes commands from an IR television remote control. But he also used the setup to make a self-balancing bot. The two motors from the Roomba have magnetic rotary encoders with 8-bit resolution. Pair this with a well-tuned PID algorithm and you’re in business. The video below shows him testing a motor with his PID code.

You don’t get very much info on the guts of the donor robot. If that’s what you’re looking for you need to look at [Dino's] Roomba 4000 teardown.

What was supposed to be a fun 1-day build ended up turning into a 3-day journey full of close calls when [Arthur] decided to give his Roomba Internet Connectivity.

The Roomba, whom [Arthur] calls Colin, has been in service for a couple of years, and once he got his hands on the Electric Imp, he had just the project in mind.  With embedded Wi-Fi and a 32-bit processor all in an SD Card form factor, the Electric Imp makes it very easy to add the “Internet of Things” to just about anything you can think of.  [Arthur] wanted to gain control of the Roomba, so he tapped into the SCI (Serial Command Interface).  Now he can read out the Roomba’s on-board sensor data including battery voltage, current draw, and even the temperature.

These are the kind of walk-through’s we love to see, because he did it in real-time, so you get to experience all of the “surprises” along the way.  For example, he removed an external charging port to make room for the added components, but that ended up disabling the dock charger.  Then he discovered that when the Roomba was charging, the input voltage to the Electric Imp breakout board was too high, so he had to introduce an intermediate voltage regulator.  But perhaps the biggest bump in the road was when he accidentally brushed the Electric Imp breakout board along the Roomba’s control board while power was on.  Luckily the damage was isolated to just one smoked — a simple FET.  The project turned out great, and (today) Colin’s data is actually visible through a public Xively feed.

Yes, this is a printing ‘bot but it’s not a 3D Printer. Even though it’s called Printbot, don’t get it confused with other products that may begin with ‘Print’ and end in ‘bot’. Printbot is half Roomba, half old inkjet print carriage drive and the remaining half is a small PC running Windows CE.

The whole point of this ‘bot is to draw/write/print things on the floor. No, not in ink, in talcum powder! The Roomba drives in one axis as the powder is systematically dropped in the ‘bots wake. It works one line at a time, similar to how a progressive scan TV displays an image on the screen. The PC on board the Printbot reads 8-bit gray scale images from a USB drive, re-samples the image and outputs the image one line at a time to an external microcontroller. The microcontroller is responsible for driving the Roomba forward as well as moving the hopper’s position and dispensing the powder in the correct place. Check out the small photo below. That black and white strip is not there for good looks. It is part of the encoder positioning system that is responsible for communicating the location of the hopper back to the microcontroller.

To dispense the talcum powder there is a funnel that acts as a hopper. Down the center of the funnel is a drill bit that prevents any powder from falling out. A small DC motor rotates the drill bit for a specific amount of time and just the right amount of powder comes out of the funnel spout. The funnel is then moved to the next spot that requires a powdery deposit and the process repeats itself.

Now if only someone could come up with a robot vacuum to follow the Printbot and clean up all that mess!

Do you think this is cool but don’t dig the talcum powder? Check out this similar setup from back in the day which uses a marker to write in a dot matrix style.

We love forward thinking companies that take a risk and do something different. iRobot, the company behind the iconic Roomba, just released the newest version of their Roomba Create — a programmable Roomba (minus the vacuum) that can be hacked and programmed to do all sorts of things.

The company developed the Create with STEM students in mind — a robotics learning platform. It came out originally back in 2007, and we’ve covered many hacks that have made use of it. Many. Like, a lot. One of our favorites has got to be this data center monitoring robot that makes use of the platform!

Anyway, the newest version of the Create features the typical hardware upgrades you’d expect, and with some special emphasis on 3D printing. In fact, the CEO of iRobot [Colin Angle] thinks that 3D printing is going to make a big difference in a few years:

“Your Roomba could be a software file that you print at home,” he says. He says the Create’s new features are a way for the company to get ready for that day, while also providing a platform that educators and hobbyists can use to tinker.

Kudos to you guys, iRobot! We just wish people would stop giving Roomba’s knives…

[Thanks PSUbj21!]

A few years ago, Roombas — everyone’s favorite robotic trash can — graced the pages of Hackaday with reverence. There was nothing this little robot couldn’t do, save for going up stairs. Roomba hacks have died off since then, and these little trash cans have been swallowed up by dumpsters. It’s all very sad, really.

[Mike] has had one of these Roombas around for a while, sitting in a closet, waiting for someone to make use of it. He recently dug it out, looked it over, and watched the LEDs light up after troubleshooting a problem with the batteries. Then the problem was how to control it.

He had wanted to connect it to a VIC-20, but the handy serial port on the Roomba only accepted baud rates between 19.2k and 57.6k. The VIC-20, with the ancient 6522 VIA, could only bitbang a serial port up to 2400bps. Then the idea hit him. In his closet of ancient technology, [Mike] had a Tandy 102, a slightly upgraded TRS-80 Model 100 that could easily drive a serial port at 19.2k.

When it comes to a mobile retro robotics platform, [Mike] couldn’t have found a better computer. The Tandy 102 has a display, a BASIC interpreter, enough RAM to run a Roomba, and is powered by a few AA batteries. He did need a little bit of level conversion for the serial port, but a MAX232 took care of that easily.

With everything put together, [Mike] had a robot and a computer that is at least as good as the old Heathkit HERO robot. You can check out a video of the Tandy bot below.

First introduced in 2002, The iRobot Roomba was conceived as a robotic vacuum cleaner. Just about every hacker, maker, and engineer out there immediately wanted one. The Roomba proved to be more than just a vacuum though; it was the perfect base for any household robotics project. Before long Roombas were being hacked to do way more than sweep your floor. iRobot recognized this, and added a hacker friendly serial port to later model Roombas. They even released a vacuumless version called the iRobot Create. Thousands of projects have literally ridden on the wheels of the Roomba. This week’s Hacklet is all about Roomba projects.

We start with [fuzzie360] and Poor Man’s Raspberry Pi Turtlebot. [Fuzzie360] has their Roomba running Robot Operating System (ROS). ROS actually is running on an on-board Raspberry Pi. While Willow Garage may be out of business, ROS lives on as an open source project run by Unbounded Robotics. Installing it can be a chore though. While [Fuzzie360] hasn’t given a full tutorial, they have offered to give advice if and when you get stuck.

A Raspberry Pi would be overkill for the simple suite of sensors built into the Roomba, but it’s perfect for [fuzzie3680’s] modified setup with a Microsoft Kinect. [Fuzzie360’s] goal is to have a robot that can vacuum the hostile territory of a university apartment.

Next up is [Sircut] who upgraded his Roomba’s power cell. Early Roombas were designed to use Nickle Metal Hydride (NiMH) batteries. The individual cells are built into a proprietary iRobot battery pack. NiMH can’t hold a candle to Lithium Ion batteries though. Lithium Ion cells are very common these days in devices like cell phones and laptops. In fact, [Sircut] used 18650 sized laptop cells for this upgrade. [Sircut] also added the essential LiIon battery protection circuit to make sure those cells stay happy. A voltmeter provides a visual reference that the batteries aren’t becoming overcharged. An upgrade like this will likely double the Roomba’s runtime, but it does come at a cost. Roomba’s original charge dock can no longer be used as the on-board charge circuitry isn’t designed for LiIon battery charge algorithms.

Next is [Marcel Varallo] with Robot Wars for the Commuter. How does the IT department blow off steam? Fighting robots of course! Unfortunately, [Marcel’s] coworkers aren’t all programming mavens. Hopefully some programming is in the cards for them down the road. For now though, [Marcel] has created a robot fighting league using nearly stock Roomba robots. Each bot gets a set of 3 balloons and 3 pins. A balloon represents a life. Once your lives are all popped, you’re dead! [Marcel] also created an upgrade system where winning ‘bots can move on to stronger weapons like flamethrowers. During his research, [Marcel] found out that the brushes in his Roomba are powerful enough to sweep dust and debris up without the vacuum enabled. So he’s disabled the vacuums for longer cleaning battle times.

Finally we have [Fredrik Markström] and ESP8266 controlled Roomba. [Fredrick] is hacking an ESP8266 module to be the main computer of this little Robot. Of course, a ‘8266 means it will be carrying WiFi, so this robot needs to have a web interface. [Fredrik’s] first problem was powering the ESP8266. The Roomba’s battery runs around 15 volts, which is definitely not friendly to the 3.3 volt ESP8266. A switching DC to DC converter was in order, and [Fredrik] found the perfect candidate on eBay. The ‘8266 will control the Roomba through the serial interface included on all the current models. [Fredrik] has big plans for this ‘bot, including navigation and advanced vacuuming algorithms.

If you want to see more Roomba projects, check out our new Roomba project list! If I missed your project, don’t be shy, just drop me a message on Hackaday.io. That’s it for this week’s Hacklet. As always, see you next week. Same hack time, same hack channel, bringing you the best of Hackaday.io!

For those of us lucky enough to own a Roomba, it makes taking care of dust in your house a breeze — but it could be better. Which is why [Marcel] spent his weekend upgrading his Roomba — or should we say, Doomba.

He started out with modest intentions. What’s stopping his Roomba from going a bit faster? He was pretty sure he could crank up the output a little bit. Donning his white lab coat and safety glasses, he set out do upgrade this little bot into something much more formidable.

12 hours later he slipped back into a conscious reality. Not only had he upgraded his Roomba, he had turned it into a mini war machine — the Doomba.

The upgraded bot features a UE BoomBox allowing him to play Flight of the Valkeries as he descends on his helpless dust-mite prey. Remote control features are now accessible using a Playstation 2 wireless dongle and Arduino. A Raspberry Pi allows for webcam recording and WiFi capabilities — specifically for the remote triggering of tasks. He even threw on a bank of capacitors in a hacky fix to prevent brownouts from the SPI port.

As long as Roombas have been around, people have been modifying them to suit other purposes — heck, even the company Roomba itself released a hackable version!

Imagine this: you come home after a day at work. As you open the door, your nose is the first alert that something is very, very wrong. Instead of the usual house smell, your nose is assaulted with the distinctive aroma that means your dog had an accident. The smell is stronger though — as if Fido brought over a few friends and they all had a party. Flipping the lights on, the true horror is revealed to you. This was a team effort, but only one dog was involved.

At some point after the dog’s deed, Roomba, your robot vacuum, took off on its scheduled daily run around the house. The plucky little robot performed its assigned duties until it found the mess. The cleaning robot then became an agent of destruction, smearing a foul smelling mess throughout the space it was assigned to clean. Technology sometimes has unintended consequences. This time, your technology has turned against you.

This scene isn’t a work of fiction. For a select few families, it has become an all too odoriferous reality just begging for a clever fix.

iRobot’s Roomba has been around for 14 years now. Over the years Roomba has evolved into a complex robotic vacuum. Current models have the iconic front bump sensor, as well as cliff sensors for stairs. A forward IR sensor allows the robot to slow down before striking furniture. Dirt detectors determine if an area is clean, or needs more attention. The flagship 900 series even includes a camera and computer running the Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (vSLAM) algorithm.

All these sensors are great for 99% of the cleaning a Roomba will perform. However, the 1% edge cases are where the demons hide. The demon in this case is a steaming surprise left behind by a pet. [Jesse Newton] found himself in just such a situation last week. His Facebook post on the subject quickly went viral. An iRobot spokesperson was quoted in The Guardian as saying  “Quite honestly, we see this a lot. We generally tell people to try not to schedule your vacuum if you know you have dogs that may create such a mess. With animals anything can happen.” The spokesperson went on to say that their engineers are working on the issue. If the spokesperson (and The Guardian) are to be believed, Somewhere inside iRobot, there is an engineer contemplating all the life choices that brought them to this assignment: designing a system to allow the robot to detect pet droppings.

iRobot, the company behind the little circular robot, was quick to embrace the hacker community. Many models of the Roomba include a serial connection. There is even a special Create model for hackers, schools, and makers. Here at Hackaday we believe in giving back. iRobot has given quite a bit to the hacker community over the years. Helping the beleaguered iRobot engineers in their quest to detect the disgusting is the least we can do.

It turns out that sensing animal or human waste is no easy task. Here are a few ideas we came up with:

• Methane – The most familiar method for hackers would be methane detection. We have low cost sensors such as the MQ-4 that are specifically designed for this. In fact, that’s exactly what [IntStarFoo] is testing out in this YouTube video. The problem is that the methane isn’t produced by the fecal matter itself, but the bacteria which are along for the ride. The anaerobic bacterial process takes time, so a fresh sample may not have a detectable amount of methane around it.
• Methanethiol – one of the chief contributors to aroma of human or animal waste is methanethiol, or methyl mercaptan. Detectable by humans down to 1 part per billion (ppb), this is the same chemical added to natural gas to give it that distinctive smell. When a nose is not present, methanethiol is often detected using field sampling followed by gas chromatography in the lab. Sensors do exist, but they are up around $500 USD.
• Other gasses – waste emits a potpourri of gasses, including hydrogen (H2), methane (CH4), carbon dioxide (CO2), hydrogen sulfide (H2S), methanethiol (CH3SH), and dimethyl sulfide (CH3SCH3). Perhaps combinations of these gases could be used as indicators that man’s best friend is having a bad day.
• Cameras – High end Roombas already have a camera. However, it is facing up at too steep an angle to detect anything directly in front of the robot. Adding a front facing camera similar to the hazcams used in Mars rovers might be helpful here. This would also help keep Roomba from knocking over trash cans. The downside is that not all droppings are created equal. The medical industry has provided us with The Bristol Scale, which ranges from Type 1: Separate hard lumps, like nuts, to Type 7: Watery, no solid pieces, entirely liquid. It would take some creative vision programming to detect all types.
• Conductivity – waste will have a water content. An array of conductivity sensors along the front of the robot could detect if it is pushing on something wet.

These are just a few seed ideas to get you started. For the real answers we turn it over to you, our readers. How would you help iRobot through this dilemma? To put it more bluntly, how would you teach a robot to detect poo?

Ever since the Roomba was invented, humanity has been one step closer to a Jetsons-style future with robots performing all of our tedious tasks for us. The platform is so ubiquitous and popular with the hardware hacking community that almost anything that could be put on a Roomba has been done already, with one major exception: a Roomba with heat vision. Thanks to [marcelvarallo], though, there’s now a Roomba with almost all of the capabilities of the Predator.

The Roomba isn’t just sporting an infrared camera, though. This Roomba comes fully equipped with a Raspberry Pi for wireless connectivity, audio in and out, video streaming from a webcam (and the FLiR infrared camera), and control over the motors. Everything is wired to the internal battery which allows for automatic recharging, but the impressive part of this build is that it’s all done in a non-destructive way so that the Roomba can be reverted back to a normal vacuum cleaner if the need arises.

If sweeping a just the right time the heat camera might be the key to the messy problem we discussed on Wednesday.

The only thing stopping this from hunting humans is the addition of some sort of weapons. Perhaps this sentry gun or maybe some exploding rope. And, if you don’t want your vacuum cleaner to turn into a weapon of mass destruction, maybe you could just turn yours into a DJ.

This is just good, clean fun. Well, maybe not clean since this souped-up racing Roomba appears to move too fast to actually clean anything anymore. But did they ever really clean very well in the first place?

[Roland Saekow] doesn’t offer much in the way of build details, but the starting point was a 10-year old Roomba Discovery. The stock motors were replaced with 600RPM planetary drive motors and a whopping 12A motor controller. The whole thing is powered off the standard Roomba 14.4V battery pack, but we suspect not for long. Those motors have got to suck down the juice pretty fast to be able to pop wheelies and pull hole shots like it does in the video below.

No word either on how it’s being controlled; our guess is RC, since it looks like the collision sensor grazes a chair leg slightly around the 0:33 mark, but doesn’t seem to change direction. It’d be cool if it could operate autonomously, though. We wonder how it would deal with the Virtual Walls at those speeds.

File this one under “Just for Fun” and maybe think about the possibilities for your defunct Roomba. If speed-vacuuming isn’t your thing, there are plenty of other Roomba hacks around here.

With much of the world in the doldrums of the winter, hackers are getting a bit stir crazy. [Notamed Closed] would much rather be outside flying his First Person View (FPV) quadcopters. Sure there are indoor drones, but [Notamed] wanted to keep grounded. He grabbed his R/C equipment, his Roomba, and of course an Arduino to build the ultimate FPV experience.

There aren’t many details on this build, but it’s not too hard to deduce what [Notamed] has done. He’s using a standard R/C transmitter and receiver. Instead of driving servos, the receiver plugs into an Arduino Uno. The Uno translates the PPM R/C signals to serial commands. Most Roomba’s include a serial port made especially for hackers. [Notamed] simply sends the proper iRobot Serial Command Interface (SCI) messages, and the robot is his to control.

The FPV side of things is a bog standard FPV camera and transmitter, sending standard definition video to his goggles. A GoPro is along for the ride to capture high-quality video.

Sure this is a quick hacked together build. All the parts are taped on to the Roomba. We’re sure this is on purpose. When the weather warms up, the R/C equipment goes back in the air, and the Roomba becomes just another vacuuming robot – once again a danger to pet messes everywhere.

Check out the video after the break.

You can’t deny the appeal of gardening. Whether it’s a productive patch of vegetables or a flower bed to delight the senses, the effort put into gardening is amply rewarded. Nobody seems to like the weeding, though — well, almost nobody; I find it quite relaxing. But if you’re not willing to get down and dirty with the weeds, you might consider deploying a weed-eating garden robot to do the job for you.

Dubbed the Tertill, and still very much a prototype, the garden robot is the brainchild of some former iRobot employees. That’s a pretty solid pedigree, and you can see the Roomba-esque navigation scheme in action — when it bumps into something it turns away, eventually covering the whole garden. Weed discrimination is dead simple: short plants bad, tall plants good. Seedlings are protected by a collar until they’re big enough not to get zapped by the solar-powered robot’s line trimmer.

It’s a pretty good idea, but the devil will be in the details. Will it be able to tend the understory of gardens where weeds tend to gather as the plants get taller? Can it handle steep-sided raised beds or deeply mulched gardens? Perhaps there are lessons to be learned from this Australian weed-bot.

As often happens while engaged in a mundane task, my mind wandered while I was mowing my small suburban plot of green this weekend. “Why, in 2017, am I still mowing the lawn?” In a lot of ways we’re living in the future  — we walk around with fantastically powerful computers in our pockets, some of us have semi-autonomous cars, and almost anything can be purchased at the touch of a finger and delivered the next day or sooner. We even have robots that can vacuum the floor, so why not a robot lawnmower?

It turns out we do have robotic lawnmowers, but unfortunately, they kind of suck:

Bearing in mind that the video was produced by Husqvarna, it should come as no surprise that their entry in the robotic lawn care field was the top performer, and that other variables that would likely have challenged all the mowers equally, like tall, wet grass, were not tested at all. What I saw in the video was a bunch of mowers that all suffer from a couple of basic problems that answer my question of why we don’t see robotic lawn mowers in every suburban yard.

More Power!

You might think my main beef is the universal need for wires to define borders for the robots. It would be nice to see a fully autonomous robot that could locate the flower beds just using GPS and image analysis, but wire boundaries seems like a reasonable means to the precision needed to keep the bots contained. Wire boundaries are akin to “invisible fencing” for dogs, and the one-time cost of installing the wire would be amortized over years of having a robot handle one of my weekly chores. That’s a different article — [Will Sweatman] already did a great job covering automonous robot location tracking tech.

The real problem I see is a lack of power. Each of these robots is powered by batteries and they seem terribly underpowered both in terms of drive train and cutting. The lack of power is most evident in the inability of most of the tested units to deal with hills, but some were not even especially good at cutting grass. A lot of the cutting ability seems to have to do with the compromises made in the blades’ design — there are no massive steel blades on these bots. The most successful are essentially whirling razor blades that won’t survive a real-world yard where rocks, tennis balls, fallen tree branches, and pine cones the size of a chihuahua are common obstacles.

There’s a reason your average walk-behind lawn mower uses a fire-breathing internal combustion engine: nothing beats it for concentrated, portable power. The blade spinning beneath the deck of the mower has an incredible amount of energy behind it, enough to cut the grass, mulch it into tiny bits or blow it into a bag, and still have enough left over to move the machine around so you don’t have to. As noisy and environmentally unfriendly as it may be, the internal combustion engine is king of the greens, and even though battery and motor technology has come a long way, it’s hard to see that they’ll be able to match a gas engine’s power to weight ratio anytime soon.

Safety

To me, then, the essential question is: how do you leverage the concentrated power of internal combustion for safe, effective, automatic lawn care? I doubt we’ll ever see consumer-grade lawn bots with gas engines, primarily because automatic refueling is so much more complicated with liquid fuel than with electricity. The inconvenience of needing manual fueling coupled with the costs of making the machine tough enough to stand up to regular use in a dynamic environment with vibration, heat, oil and fuel spills, dust, and moisture pretty much make a consumer-grade gasoline lawn bot a non-starter.

There would be a ton of problems to solve before “Lawn Care as a Service” ever becomes a reality, not least of which is assuring homeowners that a fleet of powerful robots swarming through their neighborhoods with spinning blades of death is a good idea. But there seem to be powerful economic forces at work that could prompt a sufficiently forward-looking lawn equipment manufacturer to start working on a “big boy” machine for the professional market rather than turning out any more puny lawn-Roombas that are destined to fail.

The essence of hacking is modifying something to do a different function. Many of us learned as kids, though, that turning the family TV into an oscilloscope often got you into trouble.

These days, TVs are flat and don’t have high voltage inside, but there’s always the family robot, often known as a Roomba. Besides providing feline transportation, these little pancake-shaped robots also clean floors.

If you don’t want to evict the cat and still get a robust domestic robot platform for experimentation, about $200 will get you a Roomba made to be hacked — the iRobot Create 2. [Gstatum] has a tutorial for using a Raspberry Pi and MATLAB to get one quickly running and even doing basic object recognition using the Pi’s camera.

The code even interfaces with Twitter. The impressive part is the code fits on about a page. This isn’t, however, completely autonomous. It uses a connected phone’s sensor’s so that the phone’s orientation controls the robot’s motion, but the robot does use sensors to prevent driving into walls or falling off a cliff. It also can detect being picked up and uses the Pi’s camera to detect a green flag.

There’s a 3D printed bracket for the Pi case and the camera but unfortunately we didn’t see the design files for it. However, it is noted it is optional and it would be easy to modify a bracket off, say, Thingiverse, or use a different bracket meant for the same purpose.

MATLAB isn’t the first tool we’d think of for this sort of thing, but we are impressed that there is so much built-in capability to both control the robot and interface with the phone or mobile device. The code is simple enough that you can easily use this with students and other beginners, and have them make changes to it readily.

We talked about an earlier version of the iRobot Create when it was first out. Of course, you don’t have to buy a specific robot platform. You could just hack a regular robotic vacuum.

It’s 5 pm, the sun is slowly setting on the Leipzig conference center, and although we’re only halfway through the first day, there’s a ton that you should see. We’ll report some more on the culture of the con later — for now here’s just the hacks.

Electric Car Charging Stations: Spoofing and Reflashing

Electric autos are the future, right? Well, for now we need to figure out how to charge them. All across Germany, charging stations are popping up like dandelions. How do they work? Are they secure? [Mathias Dalheimer] bought a couple loading stations, built himself a car simulator, spoofed some NFC cards, and found that the whole thing was full of holes. The talk is in German, and doesn’t yet have subtitles, but the takeaways are that it’s trivial to offload charges to other people by cloning their NFC cards. Worse, the loading stations are Internet accessible, and of course remotely-controllable. With physical access, and a screwdriver, the entire station can be reflashed and then the game’s up. [Mathias] ended his talk with a call for community involvement in shaping the next generation of loading-station protocols and software, because after all, this is infrastructure that we’d all like to use in the future.

Open-Source Silicon: Verifying the RISC-V Spec

If we were to pick one of the largest developments in the open-source hardware industry this year, we’d call 2017 the year of open silicon. In particular the open RISC-V processor came out in hardware that you can play around with now. In ten years, when we’re all running open-silicon “Arduinos”, remember this time. And if you haven’t been watching [Clifford Wolf], you might have missed that he wrote a 3D modelling software called openSCAD or a free FPGA toolchain, project Icestorm.

Anyway, [Clifford] has turned his attention to the RISC-V architecture. He’s been working on formally verifying that a hardware design meets the RISC-V specification. In contrast to simulation, where you run the hardware from a bunch of starting values, and see if it ends up in an undesired state, formal verification proves that the hardware design doesn’t do the wrong things, at least for a certain number of cycles after startup.

All of this is nice, but it’s not worth doing unless it’s finding bugs. And he’s found bugs in nearly every RISC-V implementation, and also in the actual English-language specification as well. A free and open formal verification suite for an open processor specification eases the way for all future developers. This may seem abstruse at the moment, but it’s paving the way for a revolution.

Robotic Vacuum Cleaners: Rooting the Xiaomi Blinds the Cloud

The Xiaomi robotic vacuum cleaner would certainly make a great platform for hacker explorations: it has a LIDAR, batteries, decent motors, electronic compass, ultrasonic “radar”, and much more. [Dennis Giese] and [Daniel AW] got root on the device, opening it up completely. Watch the talk here. They dumped the MMC flash by shorting pins to ground with a piece of aluminum foil, and then fooled the update procedure into accepting their own image, and the game was over. They then went on to work around all of Xiaomi’s cloud services, allowing entirely self-contained operation if you’d like.

Interestingly enough, [Dennis] and [Daniel] found a reference to a tcpdump command that would eavesdrop on all network traffic inside your WLAN. It didn’t seem to be running, because there were no pcap files to be found. It could be a left-over from development, or it could be something more sinister. Xiaomi has just been featured on Hackaday for their nightlight that sends ridiculous amounts of data home. In this light (tee-hee) it’s not entirely surprising to find that their vacuum is doing the same thing — draw your own conclusions.

The Intel Management Engine, Again

One of the bigger vulnerabilities disclosed this year was the crack of the Intel Management Engine. It’s a hidden computer inside your computer, which doubles as the root of trust for basically everything else. If it could be compromised, it would be the end. It has always been shrouded in secrecy, and that’s made everyone nervous. [Maxim Goryachy], [Mark Ermolov], and [Dmitry Sklyarov] managed to attack it via a JTAG port. If you want to get into the hack in detail, this talk is for you. This hack was a very big chink in the armor of obscurity surrounding the IME. It will be interesting to see what next year brings.

What’s One Bit Between Friends?

In this technical yet accessible talk, [Filippo Valsorda] walks us through a bug he found in an encryption algorithm deep inside a Go library, and how he used a one-bit error that occurs around one time in a billion to extract the entire 256-bit secure key. By carefully crafting a public key, he can use the extremely infrequent error to sequentially unravel the entire secret. The particular bug that he found is fixed, of course, but the method of deploying tons of computing power to ferret out keys just shows how far you can push even the tiniest oracle. This talk demonstrates very explicitly that even the smallest bug is too big.

Networks Before the Internet: BBS Memory Lane

[LaForge] is an open-source radio hacker. If you’ve done any SDR work, you may have used drivers from his Osmocom project. But like the rest of us, he was a young nerdling once. And when he was young, the BBS scene was the big deal. In this non-technical talk, he takes a trip down memory lane and looks at the tech that underlies the BBS era.

What’s Next?

If you’re wondering where we’re going to be tonight, check out the schedule and watch live streams. In particular, there’s a talk on the state of computing in North Korea, tweaking FitBits, cracking WPA2, and a talk that promises to be the “Ultimate Apollo Guidance Computer Talk”. And then we’ll take a nap, and do it all again tomorrow.

We can’t see it all. Let us know what you’ve seen, and what we must.

After you’ve taken a moment to ponder the turn of phrase used in the title, take a look at this scratch-built robotic vacuum created by [theking3737]. The entire body of the vacuum was 3D printed, and all of the internal electronics are off-the-shelf modular components. We can’t say how well it stacks up against the commercial equivalents from iRobot and the like, but it doesn’t look like it would be too hard to build one yourself to find out.

The body of this rather concerned-looking robot was printed on a DMS DP5 printer, which is a neat trick as it only has a build platform of 200 mm x 200 mm. Once all the pieces were printed, a 3D pen was used to “weld” the sections together. The final result looks a bit rough, but should give a bond that’s just as strong as the printed parts themselves.

The robot has four sets of ultrasonic range finders to detect walls and obstacles, though probably not in the positions you would expect. The right side of the robot has two sets of sensors, while the left side only gets one. We aren’t sure the reasoning behind the asymmetrical layout, but presumably the machine prefers making right turns.

Control is provided by an Arduino Mega and the ever-reliable HC-05 Bluetooth module. A companion Android application was written which allows configuring the robot without having to plug into the Arduino every time you want to tweak a setting.

We can’t say we’ve seen that many DIY robotic vacuums here at Hackaday, but we’ve certainly featured our fair share of hacks for the commercially available models.