Pi Video Streaming and Roomba Control

Combines a Raspberry Pi with Pi Camera and a Roomba.

Drive your Roomba around with any web browser, while streaming video. Requires Python 3.

A mashup of https://github.com/waveform80/pistreaming and https://github.com/AtsushiSakai/PyRoombaAdapter.

Hardware and Project Description

See more in-depth writeup, with pictures, at https://yakinikuman.github.io/pistreaming_roomba.

Software Prereqs

The software has been tested on a Raspberry Pi 3B running Raspbian Buster (headless, but that shouldn't matter).

First make sure you've got a functioning Pi camera module (test it with raspistill to be certain). Then make sure you've got the following packages installed:

$ sudo apt-get install ffmpeg git python3-picamera

$ pip3 install pyroombaadapter ws4py

Usage

Clone pistreaming_roomba project to Pi. Run the Python server script which should print out a load of stuff to the console as it starts up:

$ cd pistreaming_roomba
$ python3 server.py
Serial port is open, presumably to a roomba...
Initializing websockets server on port 8084
Initializing HTTP server on port 8082
Initializing camera
Initializing broadcast thread
Spawning background conversion process
Starting websockets thread
Starting HTTP server thread
Starting broadcast thread

Now fire up your favourite web-browser and visit the address http://pi-address:8082/ - it should fairly quickly start displaying the feed from the camera.

Use the buttons below the video feed to control the Roomba.

Forward/Back - increase/decrease Roomba's forward speed

Left/Right - increase/decrease Roomba's spin rate

Halt - set Roomba's speed and spin rate to 0

Dock - put Roomba in docking mode

Power - triggers remote Roomba power on. This requires a Roomba hardware modification, see https://yakinikuman.github.io/pistreaming_roomba. Note that this isn't needed if you manually power on Roomba.