In my last post, I affirmed that I could talk to my rootooth directly through the serial device. The next step in getting things up and running with clojure is a java shim. There’s a great library out there called roombacomm, but it uses rxtx for serial communication which proved problematic for me. This post will talk about getting our basic beep program working in Java.

In my previous post, I talked about ordering a rootooth to get started playing with robots and clojure. In this post I talk about communicating with it over the serial port. Before writing any real code, I wanted to talk to the roomba directly over the serial interface just to make sure things worked.

I’d like to get my daughter interested in Software Development. At the time of this writing, she’s 4 years old. There’s a whole bunch of resources out there to teach programming to small children, but first I want to spark her interest. I figure a good way to do that is to build something fun to play with. That could be a game or some sort of art tool, but I feel like a robot would be even better. What kid could resist, right?