Hacking Your Vacuum Cleaner To Play Mario Using RoombaMidi

Roomba vacuum cleaner robots have piezo beeper and several noisy motors. While these could be annoying to some people, for Tod Kurt, they served as inspiration to create RoombaMidi, a Mac OS X application that creates a virtual MIDI instrument. If you’re running the application, try playing around the MIDI and watch the Roomba bust a move. Play E three octaves below middle C and the robot will spin left. Pressing the key harder will make it spin faster. A low C sharp will cause the LED to flash and hitting the key harder will change its color. The software can control up to 16 Roombas over different MIDI channels.

The demo below is hardly musical, but it’s enough for you to think of legions of Roombas playing that infectious Super Mario song while you sleep at night.

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Roomba vacuum cleaner robots have piezo beeper and several noisy motors. While these could be annoying to some people, for Tod Kurt, they served as inspiration to create RoombaMidi, a Mac OS X application that creates a virtual MIDI instrument. If you’re running the application, try playing around the MIDI and watch the Roomba bust a move. Play E three octaves below middle C and the robot will spin left. Pressing the key harder will make it spin faster. A low C sharp will cause the LED to flash and hitting the key harder will change its color. The software can control up to 16 Roombas over different MIDI channels.

The demo below is hardly musical, but it’s enough for you to think of legions of Roombas playing that infectious Super Mario song while you sleep at night.

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