Having worked with Roomba SCI a while back, a few things come to mind. First is a lack of integrity checking. The default baud rate of 57600 is too high (at least for the 6-ft mini-DIN cables we could find), and it's really annoying when your Roomba goes careening off in a weird direction because your command got corrupted. Thankfully the baud rate can be reduced, but there really ought to be something in the next layer to check integrity, as the Roomba firmware is a black box.

Also, it's kinda obvious in retrospect, but Roombas were not designed to drive in straight lines. Which can be annoying if you want to use them as a robotics platform.

Their competition Neato has, in my opinion, a more interesting platform to hack on, mostly due to the fact that the device has a LIDAR sensor on top.

http://www.neatorobotics.com/resources/programmersmanual_201... http://xv11hacking.wikispaces.com/

I was going to crack a "Roombaduino in 3..2..1.." joke but it turns out there is already a library for this: http://www.airspayce.com/mikem/arduino/Roomba/ (-:

https://github.com/dotjosh/iRobot.NET I wrote one a while back as well, if you are using .net

the cool kids are all using https://www.npmjs.org/package/roomba