I noticed on the Sparkfun site, under “Development Tools” there is a new (not yet active) category “Roomba”. Can anyone elaborate? Will you be selling complete Roomba platforms, or only modifications?
Roomba, the working man’s Aibo 
Given where it’s located, I suspect a programming/debug cable or the like. Who knows, maybe there’s a clone of the CPU board that someone cooked up?
maybe something like this? note the bluesmirf:
Shoot - I’ve got to email Phillip! That’s a BlueSMiRF! Cool!!
So the Roomba category. We are slowly but surely teaming up with RoboDynamics and I-Robot to create some 3rd party dev tools for the roomba. Yes bluetooth, yes USB to DIN7. Nothing too nifty but I think we’re going to get a Roomba out of the deal Sweet! My personal project #1 is to hook the WiTilt to the Roomba for a Sunday afternoon remote-controlled drive.
We cannot launch the two Roomba products until RoboDynamics gives us the green light. They are currently just a bluetooth to DIN-7 Roomba-SCI interface and the other product is a USB (cp2103) to DIN-7 Roomba-SCI interface.
Let this be a lesson to every developer out there. Roomba choose a 7-pin DIN connector. There are only two people on the planet that make a 7-pin DIN cable. These DIN cables are going to be more expensive than anything. Had they added 1 pin and made it an 8-pin cable (tie another pin to ground for goodnes sakes) the DIN cable would have been $0.25 each. Oh well.
-Nathan
Apparently, an 8-pin MAC seriel cable can be fairly-easily modified to 7 pins. This can be found as a link from engadget’s page on hacking the roomba.
Really? I thought the pin locations where completely different. Maybe I’ll take a second look.
-Nathan
here’s the scoop…
HOW TO - Make a Roomba Serial Interface
By Tod E. Kurt & Mike Kuniavsky
A week ago I got my OSMO//hacker Roomba firmware updater from iRobot. It worked like a charm, giving me a serial port to fully control the Roomba.
An interface was needed however, since the crazy mini-DIN 7-pin on the Roomba is very unstandard. So the first attempt at a robust interface between a Roomba and a standard PC serial port is my Roomba Serial Interface.
The Roomba Serial Connector
It seems people are confused by the mini-DIN 7-pin connector, citing difficulties in obtaining that specific plug. It turns out that mini-DIN 8-pin plugs will mechanically mate with the 7-pin jacks, with the center key hole in the 7-pin female jack taking the middel pin of the 8-pin plug. Mac high-speed serial cables from the 1990’s work great for this, and I have a ton of those from all my misspent youth doing MIDI on a Mac. So chop up those old Mac serial cables! If you can’t find one, Jameco will sell you one for $3.29.
the rest can be found here:
misspent youth doing MIDI on a Mac
Misspent?!?!? :?