Awesome Roomba Dissection Tutorial
Writing by Greg Intermaggio on Wednesday, 7 of April , 2010 at 12:22 am
Dino Segovis of DinoFab.com gives us the breakdown of a Roomba 4000 in a 20-minute, 2-part video packed with tons of digestible, relevant information!
Top 5 Things We Learned:
- The Roomba 4000 is very hacker-friendly, in that is has innumerable sensors and motors, most of which are easily disconnected and repurposed.
- If you’re taking apart your used Roomba, be ready for dust! These things work in dust, carpet, and generally dirty places all day- so get your mask ready.
- The drive wheels use planetary gears, which is mostly just badass – planetary gears offer a nifty solution to creating a gear train that ends in the same axis as the input. HowStuffWorks has a great article with more info on planetary gears here.
- For the front bumper, the Roomba 4000 uses IR sensors, instead of a simple button sensor to detect whether it’s touching a wall. Presumably this is for durability reasons- though that doesn’t explain why they opted for normal pushbutton sensors elsewhere.
- Every sensor has a unique plug, making disassembly/reassembly infinitely less terrifying, since it’s easy to determine what goes where. No more plugging the kneebone into the jawbone.
All in all, the 2-part video is an impressive show of Roomba knowledge- the ease with which Segovis moves through the different parts of the dissection show that he’s had his hands in a fair few robots. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did- now I’m off to Craigslist to look for my own!
[ I Heart Robotics ]
Comments (2)
Category: Consumer, DIY, General
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Comment by Whit
Made Wednesday, 7 of April , 2010 at 7:24 pm
Lots of great info here. Thanks for posting. Thanks also for the link to DinoFab.com
Comment by Joey1058
Made Monday, 19 of April , 2010 at 6:02 am
The Roomba has a speaker? And an inaccessable serial port. When are the designers going to realize a USB port just makes more sense? I remembered that I have a planetary gearbox from an old power screwdriver I dissasembled a few years back.
