July 17, 2006

Phidgets AS3

Here's an Alpha AS3 rewrite of the AS2 phidgets Library. It's still very early on the developing process, but I thought I'd give everyone who might be interested a quick peek of what you can do with it.

December 01, 2003

Phidgets: they are alive!

whoohoo! It works! I'm having flash talk to Phidgets and all the way around! My crappy VB is giving me headaches, but luckily once the exe wrapper is done I won't have to care about VB anymore. The plan is building a base executable which connects and talks directly to the Phidgets components. Then you'll be able to load a swf which holds all the counter part AS components that already know how to talk to that wrapper's API.

I'm still half way through it, though tonight I could finally make a very simple working sample.

So, right now, in flash it goes as simple as:

#include "PhidgetLib.as"

pm = new PhidgetManager()
servo = pm.getServo(0)
servo._rotation = random (180)

Simple huh?!

Well, I'm running into some troubles, trying to queue events before the actual connection is finished. Problem is that all this kind of connections are asynchronous right? So when I invoke new PhidgetManager(), and right in the next lines I get the servo and modify it's _rotation property, the connection to the servo might not be built yet, so I have to catch that, queue that request, and execute it when the connection is finished.

If I can't do it, then it will have to look slightly different, which may add a couple of extra lines. something like:

#include "PhidgetLib.as"

pm = new PhidgetManager()
pm.onConnect = function (phidget) {
   servo = pm.getServo(0)
   servo._rotation = random (180)
}
pm.connect()

I'm trying to make it as simple as possible from flash, and leave all the hard core stuff to be figured out inside PhidgetManager... but still...ain't that bad huh?

November 04, 2003

Phidgets in the house

This morning when I got to my desk, a great surprise was awaiting; a huge package from the University of Calgary - my phidgets are here! wired the whole thing, plugged in a servo, plugged the USB Interface to my laptop and in a matter of no time I was moving it with a small VB app. nnnice!! There was so much in there, servos, leds, RFID tags and readers, light sensors, force sensors, touch sensors,　motion sensors... Each hardware device in the kit comes with a pretty well documented ActiveX control (which means no worries at all about comm protocols, usb etc.), so next step will be wrapping the whole thing in screenweaver and building a flash API for it. Once that's done, there's a couple of very interesting projects waiting in line I already have ton of sketches for. ...awww maaann... here we go my midnights again...

October 24, 2003

phidgets: playing with tangible bits

"At the seashore, between the land of atoms and the sea of bits, we are now facing the challenge of reconciling our dual citizenship in the physical and digital worlds. Our windows to the digital world have been confined to flat rectangular screens and pixels, or 'painted bits.' While our visual senses are steeped in the sea of digital information, our bodies remain in the physical world. The vision of Tangible Bits is to provide seamless coupling between these two very different worlds of bits and atoms." Hiroshi Ishii, Head, Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Lab Alright, that's it for me. It's time to expand the toolset - just ordered a phidget starter kit. wohoo! Why not mindstorms? well phidgets seem to have a very well documented API, and a very nice student community behind it, plus, they are super cheap! just wait till I get my hands on these;)