Well for small and cheap I use the ubtech jimu smart servo's. They use a daisy chained 115200 baud 8,n,1 serial interface with 5v power and a 3.3v single wire data line. They turn through +130 to -120 degrees and I've picked up a fair amount cheaply on ebay. They're great for mounting sensors and it's not too hard to adapt the jimu fittings to fit to another robot. I'll try to attach some photos.

any videos on what it can do?

Hi Ezang, sorry don't have any videos yet but it only does object avoidance and follows the wall at present. I don't wish to hijack the thread, just showing how easy these servo's are to connect. The ultrasonics have been in place for about a month (tie wrapped to a couple of jimu connectors) but just got hold of the tof10120 distance sensors. As you can see in the side photo I simply screwed these to another jimu fitting and clipped them on top of the ultrasonics. Now to try some 2D area mapping using the laser sensors.

All the best skidroe

@skidroe.  Also don't want to hijack the thread, but how are you connecting the tof10120 distance sensor to ARC?  (or are you using ARC for it?).  They look interesting, mostly because they are cheap, and being laser I think they may avoid the problems of both ultrasonic and IR for object avoidance.  If you can actually map, even better.

Alan

HI Alan, I'm not using ARC on this robot (or I would have started a new thread about the tof sensors), if you look at the side view picture you'll notice a raspberry pi zero WH which is small, cheap, easy to power up and easy to code. The Tof10120 uses serial (9600,8,N,1) which I use for setting up the sensor or i2c which I use for reading the sensor as a serial read will return a string ie 'L=1000mm' whereas the i2c returns a high and low byte ie (high x 256) + low millimeters. Also the default setting on the 10120 is active reading which means it automatically sends a serial distance every 100ms (this frequency is adjustable) but I have set mine to passive reading which will only supply a distance when requested. The sensor operates on both 3.3v and 5v.

Steve

@skidroe

Thanks.  I imagine I could do something to get the data from the Pi into ARC (mqqt or something), but I have other priorities for now.  Good to know about the possibilities though.

Alan

Here is video of Roomba cleaning up.  I guess if you created a list of all known objects that are often left on the floor you could eventually train it to pick most things up.

Nink, that should be the next upgrade for roomba!!  It clears up it's own obstacles before vacuuming.