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.

After receiving “Spot”, my Roomba last Christmas, I have been really hankering to hack it. After digging around forums/mailing lists/google for awhile, nothing was yet available ready to use.

Several months ago, iRobot, the manufacturers of Roomba, released OSMO Hacking Module for interfacing with the Roomba’s onboard serial port. Since then, there have been some very cool projects that have cropped up; everything from a long serial tether, a bluetooth interface, a programmable plugin module, or a full on-board computer with WiFi access.

I think I’ll go for that latter. AutomationWiki: Roomba Entry

Resources

• Roomba Hacking projects wiki
• Make: adding a serial interface
• Make: adding a bluetooth interface
• Adding a serial tether and control software
• Adding a GumStick computer with WiFi access
• Mind Control adapter - program at the computer and then plug into Roomba (sold out until April 17, 2006)