A barebones wrapper to enable control of a Roomba via MQTT with ESPHome. Tested with ESPHome 1.13.x, and a Roomba 650 w/a Wemos D1 Mini installed.
The inspiration for this project is https://github.com/johnboiles/esp-roomba-mqtt. You'll find a detailed wiring guide there. In fact, I originally started off using that project for my Roomba 650. However, as I migrated my custom components to ESPHome, I wanted my Roomba to be on the same platform as the other devices.
I should note that like others, I initially had trouble reading the sensor data from the Roomba. I posted the solution I found in johnboiles/esp-roomba-mqtt#2 (comment)
For what it's worth, my Wemos D1 Mini couldn't read the Roomba sensors either. I found this snippet in an iRobot Create 2 Doc
In some cases, the drive strength of a Roomba TX line is not enough to drive the RX line of another board (for example, in some revisions of Arduino). In this case, a simple PNP transistor (2N2907A, 2N3906, or 2N4403, among others) can be used to provide enough “drive” for the Arduino.
I used a 2N3906 and following the circuit as described in the PDF; I can now read sensor values from the Roomba!
The D1 mini is small enough to fit into the compartment by the wheel. The example image of D1 mini inside Roomba compartment image is not a photo of mine specifically, but it's useful to see where the components fit inside the Roomba. It was sourced from a community project thread on the Home Assistant forums.
Take a look at the example directory for a fully working example.
- <example/esphome.yaml> - Contains the bits needed for ESPHome.
- <example/homeassistant-vacuum.yaml> - Contains the bits needed to integrate as a "MQTT Vacuum" in Home Assistant