Hi, I've had this original roomba for many years, but for the past couple of years he has sat dormant, unused, and unloved in the basement. Recently I was thinking 'what a shame' to let a perfectly good robot go to waste. I tried charging him up, but unfortuntaely his battery charge only seemed to last about 3 minutes. I quick looked up on the cost of a new battery on irobot's website, and decided against spending $70 on a new battery.
Then I remembered a project I had done awhile back (http://portablesofdoom.org/page.php?page=playstation), and thought that the concept should be able to help out roomba.
Here I've attached wires to the + & - Terminals where the battery used to go.
Then I attached the + & - wires to a new connector, slapped on my already owned similary volted battery (with some good old velco) and here is the result:
A plus is the roomba now seems to run for quite awhile, and the battery now charges much faster.
One downside is that the roomba can't quite fit everywhere he used to be able to fit with the new external battery pack. Still I'm happy with the results.
(Sadly, after uploading this video I ran across another video of pretty much the same thing
)Here is a quick video of the little guy in action (note, I've got my camera stuck in some weird time lapse mode - thus the video is kinda weird):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkVd1c-a4LM
Jeff