I’m spending the day here at my work bench figuring out the pin outs on the Roomba main board. There are 18 connectors and 85 pins so it’s going to take some time.
I’m finding some very interesting things here. For instance, there’s a micro switch on the front wheel that is pulsed on and off as the wheel rotates! The Roomba I’m working on was bought on Ebay as a unit with “problems”. As it turns out, the front wheel on this one is seized up with hair and crud and this causes the drive motors to behave erratically so that’s probably why this one ended up in the junk pile.
My main goal here is to identify the connectors for the IR sensors located on the front and then determine what voltages are present and how that voltage varies when the sensors are triggered. Then I’ll be able to utilize these “cliff” sensors on the 4 wheeled Roverbot to aid in autonomous navigation.
When I’m done I’ll be posting all this data to my website to share with other robots builders that wish to hack the Roomba hardware.
