Romo robot powere by ATMEGA for $20

Hi Folks,

I picked up a Romo on eBay for $20 and to my surprise, found the company defunct and many cloud features not working. So, I decided to reverse-engineer it, and discovered it was arduino based (see attached photos).

I'd love to get my paws into the chip. Is there an easy way to find which header I can solder into to be able to program it? Wish I had the original firmware, but I don't. I'd need to test each output high/low or pwm, etc. the iPhone interface is said to be a sound receptor and the communication protocol is said to be open source. Move found some info about it searching the Google cache of the robotics.com web site.

Cheers,

Hi,
What photos?? Sounds interesting.
Regards

Mel.

Yeah, I tried to post them, they were too large. I'll try and reduce them to see if I can post.

-Edit-

found my files were .jpeg, and not .jpg. Easy fix, just renamed them. You'd think this forum would allow both.

Any further interest? There's a ton for cheap on ebay.

My guess would be J7 or J8 is the ICSP header for the chip; what I would do is unplug the board from everything, lay it on a flatbed scanner, and scan it at a high DPI (front and back). Then use a paint program to fill traces to help you find what goes where). You could also use a multimeter to probe pads for continuity. Basically - download the datasheet for the ATMega328 for that particular package (QFP?) - and note pin 0, and count around until you find the pins for the ICSP connection. Then probe those pins and the pins on J7 and J8 to see if any have continuity (resistance = 0 ohms). Take some notes, and then you have it.

At that point, you'd need to get an ICSP programmer, or use another Arduino as one (there's a sketch for it in the examples folder).

That's a really good idea. I hadn't thought to scan it on a flatbed. I might have to give that a try. I was actually thinking to reverse engineer the iPhone header port and test the open source audio protocol Romo is supposed to use with the audio input from the header. I was thinking, once I figured out the protocol, I could create a facetime or Skype conference and stream the audio commands through it while watching remote video.

@supersleeper did you have any luck with it? Did you manage to extract the firmware perhaps? Which version of the Romo do you have?

Update:

I managed to get access to Romo's firmware. You can find it in this repo!