20 years in the past, Roombas have been the one robots folks have been prone to encounter in day-to-day life and so they have been fairly darn reasonably priced — particularly on the used market. As such, they grew to become extremely popular within the DIY robotics scene as accessible platforms to construct upon. Roomba even launched official fashions, sans vacuum cleaner unit, to accommodate that area of interest. However we don’t see modified Roombas a lot nowadays, which is why it was enjoyable to watch Lucas flip one into Boomba.
Boomba is an old-school construct like we might have seen a few a long time in the past, however carried out with trendy {hardware}. Lucas used a four-year-old Roomba as a place to begin, as a result of his mother and father have been tossing it out. Nevertheless, nearly nothing of that unique Roomba stays within the present Boomba. Lucas gutted the Roomba and stripped many of the parts, leaving simply the underside of the body and the 2 motors.
With only a pair of motors on a body, Lucad has so as to add a variety of parts simply to get Boomba transferring. These embody a DIY battery pack made from 18650 battery cells with a BMS board, an Arduino UNO R4 WiFi growth board, and an H-bridge to drive the motors. With some further {hardware} to take care of voltage ranges and circuit safety, that was sufficient to get Boomba transferring beneath its personal energy.
From there, Lucas piled on extra parts. He added a customized aluminum cap to the highest of the body and that has a number of mounting factors, permitting him to broaden Boomba’s functionality. He added ultrasonic sensors for collision avoidance, MOSFETs controlling energy to superbright LED headlights, an OLED display screen for fundamental standing info, and a MCP23017 GPIO expander to extend the variety of parts that the Arduino can speak to.
Now, Boomba is prepared for its life as a robotics experimentation platform. Lucas will be capable of add extra {hardware} over time, whereas bringing the custom of modifying Roombas to a brand new era.