Hi Frank and Nink

I attached my tripod with these stick down Cable Tie Mounting Bases. The are cheap, very strong, and and since they are stick down easy to attach and remove when wanted. They use standard Cable Ties or Zip Ties to attach them to tripod.

Frank I like your dual attachment and Nink I like your Roomba deal.

Hey Frank and Ellis,

If I understand the use case of our telepresence device, I sit at home while I steer my telepresence device from meeting room to meeting room and pull up a space at the table or hang out at the water cooler.

So if I am at home and my EZB is connected to my work network, how do I connect to it from home? Do we need to add a raspberry pi or some type of onboard compute as the EZB needs to have enough smarts on board to connect to an external location when powered up. As far as I know there is no way to get the EZB to call home directly. I think @PTP firmware allowed the V4 v1 to do this but does not (as far as I know) work on v4v2.

I am fairly new to EZB so not sure what options there are. Could we use mono or universal bot to establish a connection to robot and then control EZB from home ?

Hi @Ellis, I like your idea of the tie downs. Please send some pictures showing how you connected to the tripod legs.

I really love this forum... lots of sharing of ideas

Regards, Frank

Hi Nink, I haven't worked put yet how to control it from a remote location, but I'm testing several options some dependent on controlling a PC at the remote location and some without a remote PC

he first thing I'm working one is powering the EZB Controller and iPad from the Serial Port connector 200ma power or a means to tap the Roomba battery so that the person on the remote end doesn't have to plug in any chargers.... just using the self-charging features of the Roomba

@ptp, How does your remote connection idea work?

Regards, Frankl

@Nink

Best option will be to have a local PC with remote access (many options, let me know if you need guidance, I have used about a dozen different ones).

If you have total control of the network (ie, you can forward ports on the LAN from the internet router) , and a dynamic DNS service so you always know your IP address, you can forward a port to the EZ-B ip address (I would remap from port 23 to a different port number since 23 is a constant hacker target) you can run EZ-B remotely, but you won't get as good performance unless you have gigabyte internet at both ends (and even then, probably not as good as a local connection with a remote desktop).

Alan

Team Viewer will do what you want... Not sure if it is free anymore but at least you won't have to forward any ports which puts your network at risk...

@thetechguru, Thanks for the great advice... here is what I setup based on your suggestion and I actually got MOST of it to work WITHOUT a PC at all at the remote end..

I can test this because I have two different ISPs at my house, Comcast and ATT.

On the remote end, I just have the EZB Controller on the Roomba connected to the ATT Wi-Fi network. I set Command TCP Port to 8023 and the Camera TCP port to 8024 in the EZB Controller and forwarded those ports in the ATT router to the IP address of the EZB Controller.

On the local end, I have a Windows 10 PC connected to the Comcast Wi-Fi network and running ARC with my EZB Roomba Internet program on it. The PC is able to control the remote EZB Controller over the Internet and view the EZB camera!

I then added a mobile Interface and was able to control it from my iPhone connected to the Comcast local Wi-Fi network.

The only thing I can't do on the iPhone is view the EZB camera.

@Ellis & @Nink, Since this is now starting to get more complicated I will post a sample app and start to added step by step instructions in a Tutorial

It can be a simpler setup if you follow @Richard-R suggestion and use a remote viewer with a PC at the remote end

Regards, Frank

Hi @Frank

wow that is a bit of an issue :-) Can't imagine we want to charge a batteries at 0.1C. The charger says it is 1250mA 20v and multimeter on Din plug reads 19.8v So we have a some room to play if Roomba is not charging. We could just tap charging pads and cross fingers with a voltage regulator but the fact they limited us to 200mA lets me think Roomba needs the other 1050mA to charge. So I think we will blow the fuse in Roomba charger when Ipad and roomba are charging.

Perhaps an idea (not sure if this will work) if we could tape over charging pad on bottom of Roomba and put a new metal pad on top that connects to an inline current measuring relay circuit and then back to the taped over pad. So when the current drops (Roomba is no longer charging) we cut power to Roomba and switch to charging the other devices. We could probably current check with an INA219 and an atmega328p (well below 200mA) and a relay. So if current drops (We can assume Roomba is no longer charging ) then we switch over to a voltage regulator to charge other devices.