Roomba running on a Makita 18v cordless drill battery

I just got myself a nice new Makita 18v drill. It’s really nice 🙂

On thing about my battery operated tools I’ve noticed is that I tend to have one battery in the device and another charging. Since I don’t used them very often they batteries tend to degrade after a while, so I was thinking I could use the battery in something that I would run often to keep the battery in a nicer condition. It occurred to me that I have a pair of old Roomba’s in the shed that are just sitting there because the batteries are dead. What if I could use a cordless drill battery instead? I got a Makita battery adapter on Ebay and sacrificed one of the dead Roomba batteries to allow me to connect the two up. Now the interesting thing is the Roomba batteries are 14.4v and the Makita battery is 18v so I was expecting a bang and some smoke, but the Roomba seems to like the new batteries! I’ve since done some reading and apparently there is a version of the Roomba called the Create that can be run on 12 AA batteries. That would be the equivilent of 18v so it looks like the Roomba is built to take these kinds of voltages. I’ve yet to let the Roomba run through a full cycle as it is kind of noisy, but maybe later…

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