RoRoRoomba - Ruby on Rails on Roomba

A session at RailsConf 2012

RoR makes an excellent framework for off-the-beaten-path type of projects, like hacking Roombas and other robots. In this presentation, I'll demonstrate how our soon to be robot overlords will be happy when we gift them with RoR and a connection to the internet. The presentation will include working examples and demonstrations of:

communicating with an Arduino chip via Ruby
tethered serial and wireless bluetooth control of a Roomba via Ruby and Arduino
two-way communication with our robot friends over the web using Ruby on Rails and popular web services
useful applications of robots controlled over the web
3 RoRoR pitfalls to watch-out for
live performance of "Chiron Beta Prime" by Jonathan Coulton*

The presentation will close with an argument for why hacking on fun, often eccentric, projects in your spare time is essential for staying motivated, habitual improvement, and tangential learning -- i.e., being a real pragmatic programmer.

*not included, perhaps

About the speaker

This person is speaking at this event.

Charles Abbot

COOKPAD

Charles works at COOKPAD, Japan's largest recipe site and Rails shop. He spends most of his daylight hours building reporting, analytic, and payment management systems that millions of loyal users don't actually get to see. When he's not at work graphing bell-curves, forecasting user behavior, and throwing around gut-wrenching terms like "correlation-coefficients" and "confidence intervals" - he likes to play basketball, prepare his Roomba for the robot uprising, and dote on his newborn daughter. Charles has been using Ruby and Rails since Feb of '06.