I just got a refurbished Roomba 530. I’d been eyeballing them in general, and decided to snatch up the refurbished deal. One of the downsides is it can’t be scheduled. Not officially anyway. As it turns out the interface supplied by iRobot, the manufacturers, allows for the same low level commands to be sent to the 530 (and 510, and any other impossible-to-schedule 5xx model) as are used to schedule the other kinds.
This can be done manually, which makes for rough riding by a lot of Roomba owners, but I’ve automated it in a simple program. It requires:
- A serial port on your computer
- A cable to connect the Roomba to the serial port, I recommend the iRobot Create Cable.
- Windows with .NET 2.0 or better (standard on all computers that have been updated in something like the past 4 years)
A .zip with the program and a readme is available in the downloads section.