With the growth of faster and cheaper low-power processors and inexpensive RAM, the days where embedded applications had to be developed in C or assembler are numbered. For many applications, it is now possible to provide excellent performance with software written primarily in our favorite language, Ruby. There are, however, some special challenges when targetting a Ruby app to an embedded computer with limited computing resources. Some of the key challenges that will be addressed will include minimization of RAM and processor usage, deployment and cross-compilation using OpenEmbedded, communication with other embedded systems, and interfaces (primarily web-based). Discussion will mainly be practical rather than theoretical, with a real-life application to be used as a case-study.
