Nice, this will come in handy with the telepresence robot I and my friend have been building http://samratjp.posterous.com/look-ma-im-controlling-a-telep...

Yeah, it's pretty annoying to prototype whilst waiting for the damn thing to burn and this being a telepresence robot, I actually code it remotely (my friend has the actual hardware) using a weird combination of Dropbox, github and ssh to prototype and test. This should help. Will let you know how it comes along.

Nice! How's this compare to RAD? https://github.com/atduskgreg/rad

RAD compiles your ruby code to arduino programs everytime you want to run it.

This arduino gem is a load-once-and-play thing. You load the provided arduino.pde file to the board and use the gem to talk to the Arduino to perform actions like set/get pin states etc. So then instead of writing programs, burning them to the board and testing them, you could just fire up irb on your console and start prototyping your stuff or write a ruby script.

P.S: if I can get my hands on bluetooth-bee or arduino wifi shields, I plan to make the same thing possible on those connections too. Right now the board has to be connected via the serial port.

So this makes the Arduino act kind of like a USB bitwhacker? Or does it use a higher level of abstraction than that?

http://www.sparkfun.com/products/762

A higher level of abstraction. Unlike the bitwhacker where you pass simple serial commands, the communication is simplified with easy-to-use ruby methods.

Ah, that's awesome. Congrats on releasing some sweet code!

Thank you Steve! :)

is the arduino part based on firmata?

No. Right now its just some custom stuff that I made up. I just noticed that it had a lag. Will switch to Firmata in the next couple of days. It should be better then. The ruby interface won't change tho :) so you can use it happily.

the link to arduino.pde seems busted (relative rather than absolute url).