So this weekend saw the 2nd hackathon organized by the DC9273 defcon group, which took place at the GarageGeeks home in Holon, Israel.

I came with no real goal in mind, and no specific project I wanted to work on. As always, the best stuff comes from just browsing around and meeting cool and interesting people.

So strategically placed by the entrance door, I met Ido Hadanny, which was running the Roomba, Where Art Thou project. Ido wanted to build a system to allow him to monitor his iRobot Roomba while away from home. Sounds cool, and Ido seemed like a decent guy, so I joined in on the project.

Basically the game plan was to hook up to a open serial interface that the Roomba so generously provides, and start playing with the API - basically a set of opcodes and data sent and received over serial.

We started out with a reference Java implementation provided by http://hackingroomba.com but quickly figured out we needed to work closer to the metal, and hack our own code. After some tinkering with the RXTX serial port library (and an unsuccessful attempt at getting it to work on my Mac), we managed to start sending out opcodes and receiving signals from the Roomba. Our main focus was on receiving the Roomba location sensors, which provide us with a angle and distance delta from the previous sampling point.

The first day ended on a weak note as we failed to get any substantial data. But the following day started off with fresh code which was slightly more stable (i.e. BetterRoomba.java), but we still didn't manage to get the data we wanted. First, we might have been sampling the Roomba sensors too fast, thus giving us inaccurate results. Secondly, we suspect that we have missed something on the serial event data handler, and that somehow it is not synchronized with the input buffers, yielding corrupt data.

So, bottom line - no results, but it was a nice try, and we had a good time. All the code we used can be found, as usual, on the Githubs - https://github.com/yuvadm/roomba-where-art-thou.