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/bin / pi/systemd: helper scripts + systemd units for the rover (roverd itself plus the WHIP publisher that streams video to the server).
• 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

Need a fake rover or multi-rover testing without hardware? Use the dummy build:

cd pi/roverd
mkdir -p ../../dist
make dummy
./../../dist/roverd-dummy -config ./roverd.sample.yaml

The dummy binary connects to the Node server, emits simulated sensor frames, and logs every command it receives, so you can spin up as many virtual rovers as you’d like on your dev machine.

Admin config & authentication

Before running the Node server, copy server/config.example.yaml to server/config.yaml and customize the admin records (password hashes, Discord IDs, lockdown permission). Those credentials are used by the driver UI’s login panel—only admins can toggle locks/modes, and lockdown admins retain access when the system enters lockdown mode. The spectator page (future) can set role:set to spectator, and the server enforces all permissions server-side so client tweaks can’t grant extra control.

Deploy a rover by copying the repo + dist/roverd to the Pi and running the helper (it installs roverd plus the WHIP publisher service):

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

Then point each rover's /etc/roverd.yaml at ws://<server>:8080/rover, set name to the rover’s ID, and (optionally) override media.publishUrl if your control server isn’t 192.168.0.86. The new WHIP publisher service (whip-publisher.service) uses GStreamer (gst-launch-1.0 libcamerasrc ! ... ! whipclientsink) to encode the Pi camera to H264 and publish straight into the server’s mediaMTX instance at http://<server>:8889/whip/<name>. Install libcamera-apps plus gstreamer1.0-tools gstreamer1.0-plugins-good gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly gstreamer1.0-libcamera on each Pi so the pipeline is available. Use the “Restart Camera” button if you enable media management so roverd can bounce the publisher service remotely. Heads-up: the BRC pulser now uses libgpiod; make sure the roverd service account is in the gpio group (or otherwise allowed to access /dev/gpiochip*) and set brc.gpioChip if your hardware exposes a different chip name.

Fedora server deployment

Run the installer from inside the server/ directory after cloning the repo onto your Fedora 43 Server box:

cd ~/MultiRoombaRover/server
sudo ./install_server.sh

The script must be executed via sudo from the user that owns the repo. It will:

• install Node.js/npm plus curl/tar
• run npm install --production
• copy config.example.yaml to config.yaml if needed (edit the file afterwards for admins + media.whepBaseUrl)
• download mediaMTX v1.15.3 and drop it into /usr/local/bin
• write /etc/mediamtx/mediamtx.yml that points to the Node server’s /mediamtx/auth webhook
• create + enable mediamtx.service and multirover.service, both running as your repo user and pointing at the clone directly

Publishing rovers lives on a trusted network, so the generated config skips HTTP auth for the publish action (only playback hits the Node webhook). If you already ran an older installer, edit /etc/mediamtx/mediamtx.yml and add:

authHTTPExclude:
  - action: publish

Then restart mediamtx.service so WHIP pushes from the Pis stop getting rejected.

Once finished, update server/config.yaml with your admin passwords and media.whepBaseUrl (http://192.168.0.86:8889/whep). Restart multirover.service whenever you edit the config. To pull updates later, just git pull, re-run npm install --production inside server/, and restart the service—no need to rerun the installer.

Video handshake + diagnostics

• Every video:request returns { url, token }. The browser posts the SDP offer to url and includes Authorization: Basic base64(token:token). mediaMTX forwards the token to /mediamtx/auth, which checks the socket’s permissions and either returns 200 or 401—no query parameters are involved anymore.
• To see what mediaMTX is ingesting from the Pis, run npm run check:media (or node scripts/checkMedia.js). It hits /v3/paths/list and prints each rover’s ready state and byte counters so you can instantly spot publish issues.