On Wednesday at the SouthEast Michigan Ruby Brigade I gave a ‘lightning talk’ on Ruby & Hardware. It is a quick succession of slides (written using S5) on some of the cool hardware devices you can control with Ruby, or hardware you can control your computer with.

It has includes examples and links to using Ruby with:

• NabazTag
• Symbian Mobile Phones
• Nokia 770
• Roomba vacuum cleaners
• Apple Remotes (the kind you get with your MacBook/MacMini)
• SlimDevices SqueezeBox and SlimServer
• Lego Mindstorms NXT

There are definitely more devices out there that can or should work with Ruby. Given ruby-serialport it’s possible to control just about anything.

The iPod/Nike kit is a really interesting use of some fairly new technology made really easy for most any person to just pick up and start using. Based on experimenting by devs/hackers, they’ve figured out how to pick up the RFID connection through their own devices, something that was very apparently possible from the moment the kit was announced.

There are all kinds of really neat things you can do with such a simple tracking device for pedometry (relative distance when GPS/cell geolocation falls out), location (you are at any number of places a sensor station is setup), tracking devices in races (they use expensive/proprietary tracking devices now), and so on.

But leave it to the media to do a hype piece and scare tactic on the cool technology. Here is a CNN video on the “bad things” you can do with it.

While the information and knowledge is good, they could have done better in talking about how useful it is, the potentially good and interesting things you can do with it, but also be aware of…

Brady on O’Reilly Radar posted about Backseat Playground, a geolocation based game that tracks the location of a car and gives clues along the way for various mysteries and puzzles. (originally via Engadet who found it via The Raw Feed)

The research is sponsored by Microsoft and the Ordinance Survey, obviously both very large organizations that want to find commercial uses for their data/services.

Like the Come Out & Play festival, geolocation games can become much more common as devices come with Geolocation technology built-in, whether it be by GPS, WiFi, Cell, or whatever.

Are geolocated games the cure for the modern sloth of gaming? The Nintendo Wii already has gamers bowling in their living rooms.

Now if you can create great platforms for people to easily develop their own games, say by making waypoint, boundaries, rules, targets, objectives. And possibly use Splines/Blogjects to leave as markers, treasure, icons, etc. that users would carry around, pass off, leave, find, etc. Just wrap a nice story around it: buried treasure, Trouble with Tribbles, Pac-Man, Hunt the Wumpus etc. Really, you could probably take any old-skool game and make it into a really great geolocation game.

I missed it, but recently Navicore released the Nokia 770 Navigation Kit. You can see the press release. The system is being sold through Nokia’s site, but was

Here is a full rundown of the features and there is a good good review at pycage.

I think it looks really interesting, especially the idea of not having to carry “yet another gadget”. It supports downloading traffic and weather info over a GPRS connection. But as Pycage mentions, the prices is a little high - 200 Euro for just the Nav upgrade. And it’s also Europe only at the moment, not so useful in the US or when traveling to New Zealand.

Maemo Mapper by comparison is free, and hackable. It just doesn’t come preloaded with maps or quite as many features.

I am desperately in need of a new phone. My trusty Nokia 6600 has served me well, and still continues to chug along, but is plagued by bad sound, connection, small memory, and slow processor. I’m still drooling over the new Nokia N95, but not sure when I can actually get my hands on one (or afford it).

However, there is another drool-worthy phone coming out in January. On the same vein as the Nokia N770 tablet, which is very hackable, the OpenMoko phone is a fully hackable mobile phone. GPS, quad-band GSM/GPRS, SyncML, microSD cards, apt-get install, Linux, GTK goodness. Future versions are expected with WiFi and Bluetooth. via Koen’s Blog

Also check out the LinuxDevices article which sports images including mapping applications.