Turn Your Roomba Into a 'Doom' Map-Making Pro With Doomba

There are some weird ways out there for gamers to show their appreciation for their favorite [...]

By Liana 'LiLi' Ruppert

There are some weird ways out there for gamers to show their appreciation for their favorite games, but the Doomba has to be one of the oddest. Luckily, it's also totally badass so weirdness aside - you're going to love it if you have a helpful robotic vacuum at your disposal.

The Doomba came to be from Coder Rich Whitehouse with a nifty demo showing off how a vacuum ended up making incredible Doom maps for players to enjoy. The full tech breakdown can be seen here, including how to download the code itself, following a small teaser of how it works in the tweet below:

When explaining how the ridiculously awesome Doomba works, Whitehouse mentioned "I soon realized that there was a clear opportunity to serve the Dark Lord by conceiving a plethora of unholy algorithms in service to one of the finest works ever created in his name," he said. "Simultaneously, I would be able to unleash a truly terrible pun to plague humankind. Now, the fruit of my labor is born. I bring forth DOOMBA, a half-goat, half-script creature, with native binary backing for the expensive parts, to be offered in place of my firstborn on this fine Christmas Eve."

In order to enjoy the Doomba in all of its glory, there are a few things that need to be done first. As mentioned, "Go into optionalplugins\python, and copy the tool_roomba.py file in there over to plugins\python. Under the Tools menu in Noesis, you'll have a new "Roomba Tracker" item. Activate it to bring up the Roomba Tracker interface."

"The interface will allow you to automatically scan your LAN for Roombas (you'll need to have UDP broadcast enabled), and you'll be prompted with specific instructions for retrieving the password from the Roomba," the site added. "Once you've got the Roomba's IP and credentials set up, you can start tracking it. You'll be prompted to save a .noeroomba file when you start tracking. If you elect to do so, that's the file that will contain all of the useful data once you're done tracking."

It's important to note that it's only been thoroughly tested for the Roomba 980, so using this program with other versions may come with potential risks. To learn more, check out the official site here to start your hellish cleaning journey.

Thoughts on a Doom map-making robot that also cleans your house? Join in on the conversation in the comment section below, or hit me up over on Twitter @DirtyEffinHippy!

[Thanks, DFTG!]

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