TALES FROM MAKE: BLOG ^{Roomba Tronic} _{By Phillip Torrone}
Take a tour into the underground robotic relentlessness of Roomba hacks,
robots in the streets of Austin, and robot cockfighting.

Roomba wars!

It all started out innocently enough.

iRobot recently opened up their Roomba vacuum for hackers, tinkerers, and makers to send control signals via a little hidden port ( irobot.com/hacker). On Makezine.com ( makezine.com/blog), we posted how to control your Roomba with a serial cable or a Bluetooth computer, and all was well in the world. But you simply cannot have robots under human control; they’re better off sticking to Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws” than listening to us meat-based guardians. With great robot power comes great robot responsibility.

At O’Reilly’s yearly Emerging Technology conference, alpha geeks and technologists from around the world gather to tune in, turn on, and trade RSS feeds. One of the nightly events, the MAKE Fest, showcased a dozen makers dutifully explaining their creations, from wired clothing to retro arcade mods.

This is when it happened.

The ambient noise of conference chatter stopped, cheers were heard, money was thrown on the table. An underground Roomba cockfighting competition spontaneously erupted. Maker Tod Kurt ( todbot.com) just happened to have his Roomba with him; we happened to have a couple extra with us (you just gotta love a conference where people have extra Roombas with them).

Bets were taken; weapons were formed from what

we had available (mostly conference schwag). The crowd frenzied; mild-mannered AJAX programmers were pushing their way in to get a piece of the robot action. Oh yes, it was on.

A few days later the MAKE team was off to Austin’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival. Our little MAKE blog picked up two awards for Best Educational Resource and Best Craft Blog, and in celebration we continued our relentless pursuit of robot gaming. The details are hazy, but basically

we hustled a bar full of festival goers with some Roomba pool. And still later, with the help of some Austin residents, we played the first game of “Real Frogger.” This in celebration of Frogger’s 25th anniversary, of course.

The future of robotic games has arrived, it just hasn’t been evenly vacuumed. Complementing this issue of MAKE (our robotics theme), check the makezine.com/blog each day; we’ll have new projects, updates, and more things you should (and shouldn’t) do with robots.

 

Phillip Torrone is associate editor of MAKE.

Photograph by Scott Beale, Laughing Squid / laughingsquid.com

With great robot power comes
great robot responsibility.