Alright! So, now we know the pinout of these wheel modules, incredibly handy for interacting with them. I don’t want to just jump into it with motors and automated driving and all that, I just want to start off easy with sensors. Unfortunately, starting off easy does not equal starting off cheap. The BOM for this project is rapidly increasing the more I look into it, and that only somewhat scares me.

The first step in actually making this move, is interacting with the sensors. as I said in the last post, they use that annoying little edge card connector, which means it’s difficult to find and purchase a COTS breakout board for this. Luckily, a previous project (my keyboard PCB) is swooping in to save the day, or more accurately the skills I learned during it. I very quickly whipped up a breakout board in Fusion360, and it’s not even that expensive to make them! About 10 dollars a board. Unfortunately the minimum order is 5, this also doesn’t include shipping or tax.

Once I have these, I will be able to start setting up ROS2 nodes to interact with the roombas sensors, this will be a massive step towards turning the roomba into a modular robotics platform.

Bill Of Materials