Overview
For this project, my goal was to get GPS data into my Mac for some visualization experiments with ActionScript. After some initial prototypes that worked well using an RS232-to-USB converter, I decided that wasn’t slick enough and had it too many wires. I like things nice and clean around my desk, so I opted for adding Bluetooth in place of a USB converter.

After experimenting with some different methods, some using microprocessors and some not, I opted for the simpler route, eliminating the microprocessor. A microprocessor doesn’t add anything other than cost for the basic purpose of this project. Although stay tuned for another posting about integrating a similar configuration with the Make Controller and Arduino microprocessors.

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This may seem like a fairly outlandish edge case for external hard drives, but it’s one that I’ve run recently. Suppose you have an external Firewire drive connected to your MacBook Pro and then daisy-chained via Firewire to that, you have several more Firewire drives. Then suppose you’ve accidentally ejected that first drive that everything else is daisy-chained to. Then suppose that you’re currently in the middle of a render to one of the other down-stream drives and really need some files off of the drive that was unmounted. That removes the possibility of physically disconnecting the first drive to then reconnecting it to remount it, since the act of disconnecting would fubar the render.

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I just returned from a trip to Japan and while in Tokyo I attended an exhibition at the Mori Art Museum that was simply amazing. The show was called Roppongi Crossing 2007: Future Beats in Japanese Contemporary Art and overall the artists that participated were fantastic, with most of them creating pieces specifically for the show. However, the exhibition included one piece in particular that stands out as the best artistic use of RFID that I have seen.

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I had originally wanted to build this project with my Parallax RFID reader, but since I can’t interface it with the Make Controller until Liam at MakingThings fixes the serial BLOB implementation fixed in mchelper 2.0, I decided to complete a proof-of-concept with a Phidgets RFID reader. The application is pretty straightforward - it consists of an RFID tag embedded in a cell phone that is read for its unique ID, prompts a user to enter some data and then remembers their personal data when they return. While the premise is simple, there are a few moving parts required to stitch it together.

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I’ve been attempting to hook up a serial GPS device to my Make Controller and read in data using OSC commands from mchelper prior to interfacing it with AS3 (as an aside, it’s really nice to be able to do this with the new version of mchelper). While I’ve been able to write to the serial port successfully using both /serial/char and /serial/block, reading from it always yields some sort of disaster.
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MakingThings just released a bunch of software updates involved with Flash and the Make Controller that nullifies a lot of my previous work with AS3 and flosc. While some of the components still seem a bit buggy, they represent some major improvements. The best news to come out of this round of releases is that the flosc socket server can now be ditched (sorry, Ben Chun) in favor of connecting to the Make Controller using a new version of mchelper. Additionally it is now possible, from Flash, to connect to a board using either USB or Ethernet. As a result, I’m starting my series over to take these latest developments into account.
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On a project that I am currently working on, the team was having some issues consuming JBoss SOAP services. The root of the problem took a while to figure out, as apparently there are very few people that try to consume SOAP services experience the same issue we were encountering and The Google revealed few clues. At first we thought that perhaps the difference was between WSDL 1.1 and WSDL 2.0 and Flex’s lack of support for WSDL 2.0, as that is what the SOAP services were generating. After some initial investigation, we thought we eliminated that as a possibility. Then we discovered that the WSDL that we were consuming contained overloaded methods. Some reinvestigation at the W3C was done to see if perhaps a difference between the WSDL 1.1 or 2.0 specifications was support for WSDL overloading. It turns out the the specs are silent on this issue, so again we eliminated the difference in WSDL versions. Some additional searching after that determined that Flex definitely lacks support for WSDL overloading.
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As those of you that have been reading along with the series might extrapolate, this post is supposed to be Part 5. However, given some things that I’ve discovered in the Fwiidom AS3 implementation as well as some issues in the MakingThings AS2 classes, which I then ported to AS3 and in the process propogated those bugs, this is now an update on some progress made with some collaboration and refactoring.

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Use Case
I’ve been working on a project with a team of some of our really talented Flash developers (props Ben, Leon and Gabriel) where a Flex app being served from a non-secure URL via plain HTTP needs to connect to and consume data from another server via HTTPS and have run into some issues and a workaround that I’d like to share. For that particular project, the other server is a SOAP service running behind SSL with a Flex app served over HTTP consuming those services. However, these concepts also apply to any external data consumed by the Flash Player. A simplified diagram of the system is below:

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Doing Something “Useful” With Sensor Input

In Parts 1-3, we spent some time examining the basics of the Make Controller, OSC and how it works with (or in some cases doesn’t work) ActionScript 3. Now, we can start to do some things that might actually be construed as being useful for a project. To start, let’s get the hardware set up by hooking up a light sensor to analogin0. With that done, we can write some code to use the input from the light sensor as it detects ambient light levels to control the opacity of a sprite on the stage of our SWF.

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