On a more pleasant note...
Nov. 7th, 2006 02:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maradydd... 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!
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!
- enochsmiles watching Army of Darkness
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The naming of bots is a difficult matter
Date: 2006-11-07 03:20 pm (UTC)Well, there are some obvious choices, like fictional robots (Olivaw, Robbie, Bender, Futura, Annalee (no, not that Annalee, this Annalee) ...). You could probably narrow that down to fictional sexbots (Cherry 2000, Sy Borg, ARPA-01) or fictional battle robots (T-800, Jet Jaguar).
I don't know if there are enough cleaning bots to fill up the names for a robot army. There's Rosie from the Jetsons, and a zillion relatively forgettable scrubbots from PARANOIA, and I'm kind of drawing a blank after that.
Hm. Maybe fictional janitors? Fictional maintenance personnel? Ah, I know! Economically exploited children in 19th Century literature! I love the idea of you being trailed by Ragged Dick and Oliver Twist and all rest of the cast of Dickens and Alger and their imitators.
Or maybe famous laborers? Or famous labor organizers?