Ruby & Hardware

Andrew Turner

highearthorbit.com

Why bother?

• Cross-compiling is annoying
• Sandboxes can be a pain to setup
• Extensive libraries
• Easy to do

Give me a Ring

• Ruby on a Symbian Phone
• Google Summer of Code
• ruby-symbian.rubyforge.org

Jam to Music

slimserver = RubySlim::SlimServer.open('localhost')
slimserver.connect('myusername', 'mypassword')
puts slimserver.version

squeezebox = slimserver.players.first
squeezebox.turn_on
squeezebox.current_playlist.play

• rubyforge.org/projects/rubyslim/

Clean your house

• Roomba vacuum cleaner + bluetooth module
• Ready-built robotics platform
• Scare your cat
• Clean up after you've left
• todbot.com/blog

Wunny Babbits

NabazTag

• Who doesn't like rabbits?
• • Build status
  • Traffic
  • Class Schedule
  • BitTorrent Download
  • ...
• REST API
• opensource.reevoo.com

Wunny Babbits

Example

nabaztag.choreography do
  led :top, :red
  event do
    ears :both, 45
    led :top, :off
  end
end

How To Survive a Robot Uprising

• Lego Mindstorms NXT
• ruby-nxt
• ruby-serialport

Example

m = Motor.new(@@nxt, :a)
state = m.read_state
m.forward(:degrees => 180, :power => 5)
state = m.read_state 
puts state[:rotation_count] #=> 180

Handheld Ruby

• Nokia 770 internet tablet
• Wifi, Bluetooth
• Running Linux: Maemo.org
• maemo.mmapps.net
• #maemo on FreeNode IRC

Even now...

Example

require 'osx/cocoa'
include OSX
OSX::NSBundle.bundleWithPath("/Library/Frameworks/AppleRemote.framework").load
OSX.ns_import :AppleRemote

class AppleRemoteDelegate < OSX::NSObject
  addRubyMethod_withType('appleRemoteButton:pressedDown:', 'v@:ii')  
  def appleRemoteButton_pressedDown(buttonIdentifier, pressedDown)
    puts "button #{buttonIdentifier}, pressed #{pressedDown}"
  end
end

Putting it together

Go forth and hack

Questions?