Multi Roomba Rover

a remake of my RoombaRover project with a decentralized and embedded approach supports multiple roombas

on each roomba:

• a raspberry pi zero 2 w
  • a raspberry pi camera
• roomba's serial port hooked up to the built in serial port on the raspberry pi

pi provisioning:

• enable serial port
• disable wifi powersave
• disable bluetooth

Repo layout

• pi/roverd: tiny Go daemon that bridges the Create 2 serial port, BRC pin, and the control server via WebSockets.
• server: Node.js process that terminates rover sockets, relays commands to/from the Socket.IO UI, and serves public/.
• pi/systemd / pi/mediamtx: ready-to-drop systemd units and a minimal mediaMTX config for WebRTC publishing (roverd can optionally supervise the mediamtx service).
• docs/pi-deployment.md: per-rover build + install instructions (cross-compiling on Fedora 43, deploying roverd + mediaMTX).

Quick start

# build the Pi agent (armv7)
cd pi/roverd
mkdir -p ../../dist
make pi-build

# start the server + UI
cd ../../server
npm install
npm run start

Deploy a rover by copying the repo + dist/roverd to the Pi and running the helper (it will also fetch mediaMTX when --mediamtx is set):

cd ~/MultiRoombaRover
sudo ./pi/install_roverd.sh --mediamtx

Then point each rover's /etc/roverd.yaml at ws://<server>:8080/rover, enable the sensor stream from the UI, and drive with WASD. Use the “Restart Camera” button if you enable media management so roverd can bounce the mediamtx service remotely. Heads-up: the BRC pulser currently hits /sys/class/gpio/export, so the service needs root privileges on Raspberry Pi OS. Until it’s switched to libgpiod, set brc.gpioPin: -1 if you prefer to run unprivileged (the Create will then nap unless something else keeps it awake).