Well, as you may have noticed from my blog posts the past week or two, I have been playing around with Flash and Arduino. I have a ton of ideas and projects in mind, but wanted to start on something that wouldn’t be too overwhelming, and would give me a good opportunity to learn the basics. Well, I have finished my first project, and wanted to share it with everyone. It is a Flash / Arduino based speed detector with clients for Mac, Windows and Android based devices (via Adobe AIR 2.

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. Make sure you are using the correct BAUD Rate If your Flash / Arduino communication does not seem to be working, then make sure that you have set the BAUD rate to the same rate in both your Arduino code, and the configuration file for your Serial Proxy (such as TinkerProxy).

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 don’t 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.

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: Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. Basically, the Arduino can be a bridge from the computer to the physical world, allowing developers and artist to both read input from sensors, as well as output from the computer to the physical world.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.