On a more pleasant note...

... woot.com had the Roomba Discovery 4220 SE on special yesterday for $150 plus $5 shipping, so I did a little budget-checking and decided it was time to start establishing my robot vacuum cleaner army. (Ever since the Bluetooth-enabled Roomba cockfight at ETech back in March, I've been thinking it would be cool to get a bunch of Roombas and write flocking and swarming algorithms for them, then bring them to a conference, have them lock onto some poor bastard's Bluetooth cellphone or PDA, and watch while cackling hysterically.)

I could only afford one, but one is enough to start playing around with the Serial Command Interface. I'm pleased that the SCI manual shows a Python code fragment for changing the baud rate, but all the commands are bit-level, power-this-pin-for-this-long/send-this-opcode-and-data-packet instructions. It doesn't appear that anyone's written a higher-level API (at least not in Python, though the Illinois Roomba Lab (!) at UIUC has a C++ one). (And why would I want a Python Roomba API? Because then any Nokia S60 phone becomes my Bluetooth-Roomba-army control platform. I love you, Python interpreter. Muahahaha.)

(Note to self: in that case, do we open up a need for encrypted channels between cellphones and robots? Should I draft an RFC for SRCP, the Secure Roomba Control Protocol? "Man-in-the-middle" takes on a whole new meaning when the attacker is somewhere in the room with you!)

Anyway, one robot vacuum cleaner does not an army make, but it'll be a neat sidekick. I need a naming convention for robot vacuum cleaners!