Asked
— Edited
My first attempt to use JD and an old roomba 530 at the same time, JD acting as a pilot, using his feet on the "brakes and throttle", moving a joystick around and displaying turn, backup and brake signals with his leds.
First step,go through all the roomba tutorials here, perfect to learn the pinout on the roomba side.
Turns out that in order to use JD as a pilot, I need to go another way, the main tutorial being about using only the microcontroller on the Roomba.
I finally decided to use UART port 0 to send commands to the Roomba, using Richard R's Roomba 500 custom movement panel2 (thanks)

I simply changed the port to 0 (in Richard's panel it's set to port 1)
so that makes the roomba respond to keyboard, joystick or voice inputs.
Now for JD ( known around our house as Joe
JD is positioned on top of his "vehicle" with a movable joystick made out of a Gopro flexible stand (and I could still add the gopro to it !) and holding on to a metal bracket I added on the opposite side.
I created some moves for JD, hands, feet, head and led signals, so he could "drive", then merged my project with Richard's panel...
WRONG, roomba would drive off, but JD would try to walk, not execute my clever driver moves !
Answer was somewhere in the forum by DJ, remove JD original movement panel, install a custom panel, import my "driver" moves and voila, it works perfectly.
I will add more features to that combo in the future, sound, tracking..the possibilities seem endless... Great job by DJ and his team, not only on designing the robot and the great software, but on creating the community and learning resources...Tremendous help indeed.
congratulations
Great work on the interface with the Roomba, EZB and camera. Keep stuff like this coming! Your obviously very talented and have a good imagination. A valuable combination.
I too am a big Space 1999 fan and am fortunate to have a couple of 24 inch Eagles in my design studio.
I also have a rare 24 inch Hawk from the Wargames episode.
I really like the design of these spacecraft.
Tony
JD is "driving" then switching to mechanical levers to fire his cannons
guns mapped to joystick buttons or voice command
Great programming. I love the way you have JD moving.
http://www.nostrobot.com (if https is forced, just remove it)
A blog about an old geekosaurus interests : robots, drones, stupid movies probably only funny to me, geeky gadgets and sci-fi. welcome to my own space-time continuum.