Whew! Well, I presented last night at Dorkbot and it seemed to go pretty well. Thanks to Gareth, Alberto and everyone else who makes Dorkbot possible. Alberto was particularly helpful and encouraging, and I greatly appreciate it.

As promised I've got an audio recording of the talk to share, as well as a PDF of my slides and some Arduino and Ruby code. I haven't yet taken any really good photos of my project, but once I do I'll add some links to them here.

For those just wandering in: I spoke about using a router with a custom firmware as a way of adding wireless internet access (and more!) to your Arduino project. In particular I used the Fonera router, which is especially ubiquitous and cheap. Once you've got a custom firmware loaded you can use a simple serial link to make the router speak to your Arduino and relay whatever internet goodness you might like. I used this functionality to create an ambient display that talks to the WMATA website via wifi and uses a couple of needle gauges and LEDs to tell me when the next bus and train will be arriving at the stops nearest my apartment.

Dorkbot DC: Arduino, Meet Fonera
Audio (MP3/64kbps, 11M)
Slides (PDF, 10M)
bus_o_meter.pde (Arduino code, 3.2k)
wmatarideguide.rb (Ruby class, 1.6k)

The rest of the project code is available inside the slides. You can find some useful hyperlinks in there, too, as well as my email address.

UPDATE: The original version of the Arduino project code uploaded here contained a number of critical bugs. I've replaced it with a more complete version, but it should still be considered a work in progress.