Turning a Broken Vacuum Into a Custom Mobile Robot

When an electronic gadget breaks, what do you do with it? Most people would toss it in the garbage and buy a new one — but not a hardware hacker. Anyone who is comfortable with a soldering iron and a multimeter knows that there are still useful components inside the case. And just because a device no longer serves its original purpose doesn't mean it can't be repurposed for something else.

Clem Mayer is well aware of this fact, so when his robot vacuum lost the ability to actually vacuum, he knew all was not lost. He simply repurposed it. After putting some work into it, Mayer now has a remote-controlled robotics platform that has learned a lot of new tricks — even if it can’t clean the floors anymore.

The foundation of the project is a broken robot vacuum from 2016. While most of its original functionality was gone, the chassis still offered something valuable: a pair of spring-loaded drive wheels and motors. Rather than discarding the machine, Mayer stripped it down and used it as the basis for a Raspberry Pi-powered mobile robot.

A Raspberry Pi 5 serves as the robot's central controller, handling everything from motor control to video streaming. To make remote driving easier, Mayer mounted two Raspberry Pi NoIR cameras side by side on the platform. The dual-camera arrangement provides a wide field of view, giving operators a better sense of their surroundings. Since NoIR cameras lack an infrared filter, they can also see infrared light, allowing the robot to navigate in complete darkness when paired with an infrared illuminator.

Instead of designing a custom enclosure, Mayer installed industrial DIN rails across the top of the vacuum chassis. Components such as the Raspberry Pi, motor driver, power supplies, breadboards, and sensors are mounted using 3D-printed DIN rail adapters. This makes it easy to rearrange the layout or swap hardware as the platform evolves.

The original vacuum chassis relied on spring-loaded wheels, which created an unusual problem. Lightweight batteries did not provide enough downward force to keep the wheels firmly planted on the floor. Mayer solved this by using two 6V sealed lead-acid batteries wired in series to produce 12V. Besides powering the motors, the batteries act as ballast, improving traction by compressing the wheel suspension.

That 12V supply was stepped down to 5V through a DIN rail-mounted DC/DC converter to feed the Raspberry Pi 5. Rather than using a multimeter to tune the converter, Mayer monitored the Pi's internal voltage readings under heavy computational load and adjusted the output until the system reported a stable supply voltage. This helped avoid the low-voltage conditions that can cause unexpected resets.

Control is handled through a browser-based interface running on a low-latency Uvicorn backend. The setup allows real-time keyboard control over Wi-Fi while simultaneously streaming video from the onboard cameras. Mechanical bumper switches mounted to the front of the robot provide collision detection, giving the machine at least a basic awareness of its environment.

Mayer’s robot may no longer vacuum the floors, but it has become something arguably more useful: a machine that can serve as a testbed for future robotics experiments.