Roombas are great. I mean, sure, sometimes it’ll choke on a sock. And yeah, some times you’ll find it having a panic attack under your dining room table, bonking endlessly into chair leg after chair leg. But hey, it cleans your floors while you watch Gilmore Girls and eat Cheetos — that’s pretty much magic.
But don’t you ever wish it could do more? Things like giving high fives, invading your private bathroom time, or shouting to everyone around that it’s taco tuesday — you know, the important stuff?
Enter Slackbot Bot.
Slackbot Bot is a wonderfully wonky little robot built by the team at Redpepper, hobbled together out of an older Roomba, a Raspberry Pi, and a Tornado Siren. It hooks into the team’s Slack room by way of the product’s built-in Slackbot (hence the “Slackbot Bot” name), allowing them to command it from anywhere they’ve got slack access.
Is it a shining beacon of modern robotics and artificial intelligence? Of course not — it’s a roomba with paper eyes taped to it. But it’s damned cute, and a super fun hack — and their use of Bluetooth beacons for helping the bot figure out where it’s at is pretty slick.
Bonus footage of what I can only imagine was the inspiration: