Making Neato Robot ROS Package More Generally Usable

Now that I have some idea of what happens inside ROS package neato_robot, and modified it to (mostly) run on my Neato vacuum, I thought I'd look in its Github repository's list of issues to see if I understand what people have said about it. I didn't have to look very far: top of its open issues list is "Robot compatibility."

The author agrees this is a good idea but it has to be done by someone with access to other Neato units, pull requests are welcome. This comment was dated four years ago but my experience indicates no pull requests to improve compatibility were ever merged into this code.

But even though modifications were never merged back into this branch, they are still available. I just had to be pointed to know where to look. That comment thread referenced this particular commit which eliminates those problematic fixed arrays of expected response strings. Now it will read a Neato's responses without trying to match it up against a preset list. Of course, if a specific response is still required (like LeftWheel_PositionInMM and RightWheel_PositionInMM) all it could do is ensure code will not hang, it is not capable of inferring requested data from other robot responses.

But possibly more interesting than code changes is this comment block:

This driver reads responses until it receives a control-z. Neato Robotics has
documented that all responses have a control-Z (^Z) at the end of the
response string: http://www.neatorobotics.com.au/programmer-s-manual
CTRL_Z = chr(26)

That URL implies it was a link to some type of a programmer's reference manual, but unfortunately that link is now dead. Still, this claim of control-Z termination (if true) gives me ideas on how I would approach talking to a Neato with my own code.