Arduino Night 2

Last night was Arduino Night 2 at the Silicon Valley OpenSolaris User Group meeting.

John Weeks brought his robot, Marvin, right, which is based on an iRobot/Roomba vacuum with an arduino on it. Marvin has a motion detector connected to the arduino, which in turn communicates with the Roomba over a serial connection. The arduino also gets its power from the iRobot/Roomba (white cord on the left of the photo).

Marvin's mouth is an infrared sensor. When the infrared sensor detects something in front of it, the eyelids (the red Lego truck cab parts) open using an RC servo, and the sonar eyes detect how far away the blockage is. As Marvin detects the object moving closer, it plays a song, then enables the vacuum motor to scare away the threat :-) [Note that the Roomba is still a fully functional vacuum:)]

We discussed how to turn this robot into a larger community project. An OpenSolaris.org project could provide a reference platform to be used for robot competitions. Individual robots could use a standard reference platform based on OpenSolaris, the Roomba/Dirt-Dog, and arduinos and other small devices, but would be unique configurations and fabrications.

A future Marvin enhancement will be the addition of an Intel Atom Mini-ITX motherboard running OpenSolaris. A Roomba with OpenSolaris on an Atom CPU? Yes, a small vacuum with a brain the size of a planet.

The sparkfun site has quite a list of devices that could be supported on this reference platform, such as: color light sensor, heart rate sensor, sound sensor, fingerprint reader, temp, LCD/text display, lights, GPS, compass, alcohol/gas sensor, accelerometer, camera, pressure sensor, humidity, infrared, Xbee, magnetic card reader, motion sensor, membrane potentiometer, and range finder.

For more fun with Roomba, see Hacking Roomba and the Hacking Roomba Projects Repository. And let us know what you think about starting an OpenSolaris project for this.

Posted at 07:28PM Jan 23, 2009 by alta in OpenSolaris  |  Comments[2]