Roomba Rover History

Early Days

When the roomba rover website was first publicly available, as a single roomba that users could control, the entire server was physically placed on the roomba.

When the server would shut off, lose wifi, or otherwise disconnect, carpet's reverse proxy would show a simple text message stating that the roomba rover is not available or something like that lol.

Dawn of Multi-Roomba-Rover

Eventually, after uh.. i think there were problems or something i dont remember lol, carpet sought out to revamp the roomba rover design, to both improve the design, and allow for multiple rovers, using a central distribution server to connect to a smaller "thin client" on each roomba.

He first sought out to put ESP32's on the roombas, however, chatgpt carpet had too many problems with making that work. the big issue was that control would randomly cut out a lot.

He then moved on to a setup which used a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W on each roomba, which handled R/C controls, video streaming (with a raspberry pi camera), and as would eventually be added later, audio streaming, TTS & other sound effects.

The first roomba was built, Freaky.

New features

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Audiotest

Addition of servo motors for camera tilt

Improvement of software configuration to widen camera FOV

TTS implementation

Horn sound effect