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 (a Raspberry Pi 3) 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 offline, along with an invite to the Discord server.
Dawn of Multi-Roomba-Rover
Eventually, after uh.. i think there were problems or something (after carpet got fed up with it being unstable), 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, both carpet and chatgpt had too many problems with making that work. the big issue was that control would randomly cut out a lot due to the single threaded nature and buffering of microcontrollers.
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 multirover roomba was built, Freaky.
New features
(this article is a stub!)
- Audiotest
- Addition of servo motors for camera tilt
- Improvement of software configuration to widen camera FOV
- TTS implementation
- Horn sound effect