Roomba Hacking with Ruby

The year is 2014, and tiny (adorable) robotic vacuums have taken over our lives, cleaning up after us. That's cool and all, but wouldn't it be cool if we could tell THEM what to do instead of vice-versa? In this talk I'll discuss taking control back from the robots with our secret weapon: Ruby. Together we'll cover the basics of conversing with the iRobot Roomba, then translate this into Ruby code. After a long day of writing Rails apps sometimes it's nice to get back to our roots and work on things at a much lower level, where the number of bits in an integer makes a difference. If you've ever wanted to twiddle bits around in Ruby, this is your chance!

About Eric:

Eric Wood got his start writing horrible BASIC games on his TI-83 calculators, then somehow found his way into programming real computers. Through a series of bizarre events he started writing Ruby and thought it was pretty neat. In college he messed with a lot of electronics and thought those were cool but realized he really just wanted to make things for the web so now he does that at Spiceworks. His hobbies include (but are not limited to): tacos, anything that makes sound (but mostly guitars), and pretty much any kind of programming.

After the talk, we'll do a code kata and practice ruby!

Socialization practice at Handlebars, sponsored by Rapid7.