Arduino is Rails for Hardware Hacking

June 1, 2009 Melissa Dyrdahl

Just as Rails did for web development, the Arduino project combines powerful layers of abstraction with sensible defaults, making it easy to build hardware devices that sense and manipulate the physical world. So easy that artists, social workers, scientists, and even simple web programmers who lack electrical engineering degrees can do it.

The Ruby Arduino Development project attempts to extend these virtues by bringing the beauty and power of Ruby to the Arduino platform. RAD compiles Ruby scripts for execution on the Arduino microcontroller development board. In addition to the syntactic elegance and simplicity gained by getting to program in Ruby instead of C++, RAD provides a set of declarative Rails-like conventions and helpers that reduce boilerplate and simplify often-byzantine hardware APIs.

About the Author

Biography

Previous
Unison: A Relational Modeling Framework
Unison: A Relational Modeling Framework

Nathan Sobo presents Unison, a relational modeling framework for Ruby, and June, a JavaScript version of th...

Next
Webrat: Rails Acceptance Testing Evolved
Webrat: Rails Acceptance Testing Evolved

Webrat changes the acceptance testing ROI equation. By implementing an invisible, fast browser simulator yo...