I recently bought a Neato XV-21/25 robotvacuum, it works great but I want to connect it to my home automation system via WiFi. I thought maybe it would work with a NodeMCU V3 (ESP8266), but I have a few questions.
Is the NodeMCU (or Arduino in general) able to act as an USB host to send commands to the Neato via USB? On Windows, the Neato is just a COM port, with "echo COMMAND > COM5" I can send commands to the Neato and it responds to the commands. I want to to exactly this but on an NodeMCU or any other WiFi enabled microcontroller.
So would this be possible with the NodeMCU or any other device? Thanks in advance!
I've seen a couple of USB host shields, but none of them seem to support USB serial connection. At least it's not stated anywhere, or I didn't look good enough.
I've looked at that one, but that library is made for the USB Host Shield 2.0 which is pretty big and won't really fit well inside the Neato, there's only limited space. Is there a smaller version of the USB Host working with this library?
Otherwise I think I'll just buy a bit more expensive Raspberry Pi Zero W to do the job and create something myself. But I would love to use neatoscheduler.com which is made for ESP8266 (for botvacs, with a serial connection instead of USB).
I thought the Mini didn't support SPP, but if it uses the same chip it will probably just work fine. Guess I'll just buy one and test is out. It's not that expensive anyway.
So I bought the USB Host Shield, but what now... I need the Arduino to send a serial command via the USB Host Shield to the usb to serial converter inside the robot vacuum. But how can I send it to the USB Host shield and with what class of the USB Host Shield library?
