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Roomba art: Colorful tracings of robot vacuum cleaners

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October 5, 2009 11:25 am
By Sheila Lennon

Roomba, Economics and Long-Exposure Photography | signaltheorist.com. This is the post by Paul Chavady at Signal Theorist that started a trend, and a Flickr group: Roomba art. Sure beats Etch-A-Sketch.

Earlier this weekend I picked up a Roomba, as my old vacuum cleaner bit the dust(ha!) after an altercation with a shoelace. Like any good geek, I immediately went online to see what kind of modifications I could make to this little beast. What I ended up finding out was that iRobot, the company that makes the Roomba, actually promotes and encourages hacking the devices, even offering the tools to do so. ///

Now here's something interesting, I set up a photo camera in my room, turned out all the lights and took a long-exposure shot of my roomba doing it's thing for about 30 minutes. The result is a picture that shows the path of the roomba through it's cleaning cycle, it looks like a flight map or something. It really hits every spot!

roomba_art.jpg

Good clean fun...

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