Mike Chambers

This is a ongoing post where I will post tips, tricks and gotchas that I learn while developing with Flash and the Arduino. I will update this from time to time with more information. Read the rest of this entry »

In this post, I will show how to setup your development environment and started developing Flash projects that integrate with the Arduino electronic platform.

So, what is Arduino? From the website:
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I have been working with integrating Flash and Arduino on a project lately, and really having a blast. It was pretty easy to get started, yet there is a ton of extensibility and flexibility.

Well, I dont want to be the only one having this much fun, so I figured I would put together a quick contest. So, if you are interested in playing around with Flash and Arduino, then tell me why in the comment below. Let me know about what project you have in mind. Bonus points for creativity and visual aids.

The winner will receive the following:
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If you follow me on twitter, then you have probably noticed that I have been learning about Flash, physical computing and electronics lately. I started out working with Phidgets, and have recently begun working with the Arduino (Ill write up Flash / Arduino getting started tutorial shortly). I am currently working on a project where I need to send data from Flash to the Arduino, and quickly discovered that it is not as easy as I thought it would be. In this post, I will show an example of how to send multibyte Numbers from ActionScript to Arduino.
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I have just moved the as3corelib library over to GitHub (at the urging of Darron Schall). This should make the project a little easier to manage, and in particular, make it easier for developers to contribute patches, and for me to review and accept them.

All files, issues, source, and wiki pages have been moved from the old site to the new one. The old site is still up, but directs people to the new site, and will no longer be updated.

Make sure to update your bookmarks to:
https://github.com/mikechambers/as3corelib

Thanks to Darron Schall who help with the transition.

Phidgets are a set of devices and sensors that provide a simple way for developers to create applications that both send and receiving information from external sensors, motors and pretty much anything else you can hook up via electronics. They are similar to the open source Arduino electronic platform.

Im not going to do a big comparison between Arduino and Phidgets in this post. I plan to do that in another post (along with an Arduino / Flash hello world article). Suffice it to say though, that one of the major benefits of Phidgets, is that the Phidgets devices are a bit higher level, both on the hardware, and software side and thus can be a little easier for a developer new to electronics to get started with.
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I am really excited about the FITC San Francisco Flash conference, coming up in about a month. First, it is a FITC conference which means all of the top Flash designers and developers in the world will be speaking and hanging out. But more significantly, it is FITC in SAN FRANCISCO, the first major Flash conference in San Francisco in quite a while. As you probably know San Francisco is the home to the Flash authoring and player teams, as well as some of the top creative agencies and developers in the world. This makes it an amazing opportunity to not only see some of the coolest stuff going on in Flash today, but also hang out with all of the people making it happen.

I am doing a session talking about some of the lessons I learned around mobile optimizations while working on my PewPew game and other mobile projects over the past year or so. This will focus primarily on Android development, but is relevant for other Flash Player 10.1 mobile platforms, as well as desktop development.

So, what sessions and speakers am I most looking forward to?
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I have finally released the source code for my PewPew game. PewPew is a game I started working on over a year ago to help me understand what optimizations would be required to convert a web based Flash game to run on the iPhone. I had planned to release the code earlier, but a little hiccup around iPhone support delayed that. Now that Adobe AIR for Android is in public pre-release, and I have had time to comment all of the code, it is ready to be released.
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I have just posted a new release (.93) of as3corelib. The corelib project is an ActionScript 3 Library that contains a number of classes and utilities for working with ActionScript? 3.

You can view a complete list of changes in the change list (items 75 – 106).

You can download the updated SWC and source from the project’s download page.

Thanks to Christian Cantrell for helping build the release.

For today’s myth, I want to cover one that has its roots in some fundamental misunderstandings around video technologies. That is the idea that H.264 Video (deployed via the HTML5 video tag) will kill Flash. This is a more recent meme, which has spread with the growing awareness of the forthcoming HTML5, but is unfortunately based on some fundamental misunderstandings about Flash, video capabilities, and the web in general.
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