Jacked.  While he was checking Outlook over-the-air via his pre-release 3G iPhone on loan from Pablos.

It’s been quiet over here at Hundrad HQ. Too quiet. Something had to give eventually.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been working quietly on a project to implement a Pac-Man style game (I don’t say Pac-Man per se because I don’t want to irk the rights holders) with Roombas. Initially, I called this “Pac-Roomba”, until I hit upon the (in retrospect, obvious) name “Vac-Man”. The idea was initially inspired by the first Hacker Arcade at ShmooCon 2006. I’ve talked about the project to maybe a grand total of a dozen people and have sworn them all to secrecy because I was concerned someone would scoop me should it become common knowledge.

Well, I’m not scooped yet, as far as I know, but it’s getting close. A few years back I had heard through mutual friends that Tod E. Kurt, author of Roomba Hacks, was working on the same sort of project while writing the book. If he did, I don’t know if it ever got released, or if he’s still working on it. So you can imagine my dismay when I saw this on Hack a Day recently. Apparently Ron Tajima has put together a Pac-Man style casemod for his Roomba, which is just awesome. But there’s a line in the Hack a Day post that literally made me cry out “Nooo!” when I read it: “He hopes to use this platform to create a real world version of the game.”

Of course, this is excellent news, for a couple of reasons. One, I can lift my self-imposed gag order on the project, and two, I was looking for someone to come up with a good casemod, especially with LEDs, because if I had to do it myself, it was going to be another thing adding to the length of the project.

Speaking of the project, here’s where I stand: thanks to the helpful intervention of Pablos, his company Komposite, and Helen Grenier at iRobot, I have two Roomba Discovery robots and a number of IR walls. I’ve been using these as test beds for programming the Roombas, and playing with maze layouts, Roomba speed, dimensions of the game, etc. I’ve also been investigating lightweight flooring material that can be used to create a portable play surface which breaks down and reassembles for easy transport and setup.

The idea has always been to create a full scale version of the game, which is playable both autonomously (demo mode) and with the player controlling the Pac-Roomba/Vac-Man bot. Ghosts will follow their individual strategies as in the original, and the maze will be configured to match. Some things are likely to be impossible to do, like bouncing cherries, or ghost eyes returning to the ghost pen in the center after being eaten, but others are implementable with a little bit of creativity. For instance, the current going theory for implementing “hyperspace” on the sides of the maze involves having a spare Pac-Roomba which can be quickly shuttled underneath the play surface via a conveyer belt mechanism, and having ghosts move on top of one another is possible if their cases, which are a series of LEDs covering the top, can switch ghost sprites (and with the accompanying on-the-fly ghost logic switch on the physical Roomba).

More fantastical blue sky ideas involve having the player interact with the robot playfield through a customized and instrumented version of the Pac-Man game ROM and MAME, but this may be a bit too much to manage. For one, the speed of the actual game is faster than the Roombas are likely to be able to handle. Another idea (which may still be possible with some tweaking) was to have something physical on the maze surface which represent the pellets that Pac-Man collects, and to have those be detected by the dirt sensor and counted on collection, leading to a more physical way to score points in Pac-Roomba/Vac-Man.

The project is overall not as far along as I’d like. Part of that is due to moving cross-country, and the other part of it is just due to regular day-to-day life. I work on it in my spare time, as with my other projects, and there’s lots to be done. As luck would have it, with the recent creation of HacDC, I have a potentially extremely interested group of folks who might want to work on it with me, and with Ron’s YouTube revelation, I can come out of my cone of silence. Which leads me to my request: out of all the places that Ron’s video was mentioned and linked to on its way to Hack a Day, I didn’t manage to find an email address for him. I’d love to contact him and join forces, if he’s up for it. So, LazyWeb, bring me the email address of Ron Tajima! Or, at the very least, please let him know I’d very much like to talk with him.

Thanks!

(wakka wakka wakka…)