Roomba Pac-Man


[Ron Tajima] fashioned a Pac-Man casemod for his Roomba using 448 LEDs and a SH2 MPU control unit. It features the correct arcade sounds and even the death animation. The bot has Bluetooth access thanks to his previous Wiimote hack. He hopes to use this platform to create a real world version of the game.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wsP_nmk_iw&hl=en]

For more Roomba hacking, check out the Hacking Roomba book and our previous Roomba related posts.

[via Geekdad]

15 thoughts on “Roomba Pac-Man

  1. That’s a funny an interesting idea. The video’s nice too. I would think this could be done with an arduino and a POV arm spinning on top of the roomba to allow the whole thing to be done cheaper and with many fewer LEDs and greater visual coverage. Also, is it just the video or are his LEDs that orange?

  2. whoa, killer “why-i-didn’t-think-of-that-before” idea… almost makes me forget what hack-a-day has been doing lately..

    i wish i had a roomba to mess with

  3. interesting……but let us suppose that I actually wanted to BUILD the thing?

    no writeup.
    no schematic.
    no how-to.

    this is NOT worthy of this page………or maybe it is? is this the kind of place where “show-and-tell” equal a proper hack? We didnt used to think so. Is this the kind of place where “news stories” take priority over “working drawings”? We didnt used to think so. hackaday used to be the kind of site where one could go to find OBSCURE writeups—now it seems its the place everybody and their dog goes to read about every thing except “hacks”.

    i used to love this site…….but now……i just dont know.

    Hey Will Obrien……hear that? its the sound of negative pressure surrounding your site! cant you hear it? sucking? no? then pay very close attention to the sound of my feet walking the other way—what was that noise?
    it was me hitting myself in the ass with the door.

    no writeup? no schematic? no hack!

  4. Yeah what a waste of LEDs. Wouldn’t the guy have been better off with some lit up ‘cake slice’ sort of things? I don’t think you can buy such things, but to shine some bright bulbs from underneath some sheets of translucent yellow plastic I think would look neat.

  5. Don’t be such a hard-on… I agree writeups are nice, but it is still worth something to see a video of a cool idea. If it gives people ideas for similar hacks, no harm done.

  6. Are you quite done ranting?
    anyhow, I think POV solution would have looked cool also, but maybe that’s just me… It seems like a lot of LEDs to assemble the way he has it here… The idea is pretty funny though, and I really liked it.

  7. Zoinks, you don’t need a schematic. What you need is an original idea. Try to invent something different, something cool and maybe one day your work will be featured on the site.

    There are some things that are functional, and for those, I agree having the instructions is beneficial. There are other things, like this here, that are purely artistic or exploratory. There is nothing to be gained from recreating the same pacman hack.

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