phy5ics http://phy5ics.com/blog Technology writings by John Barton devoted to examining topics that surround the Flash Platform, physical computing, data visualization and video delivery in addition to the tangential exploration of other emerging technologies. Fri, 25 Jul 2008 02:16:37 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.2.1 en Thanks for all the Fish http://phy5ics.com/blog/2008/07/24/thanks-for-all-the-fish/ http://phy5ics.com/blog/2008/07/24/thanks-for-all-the-fish/#comments Fri, 25 Jul 2008 02:16:37 +0000 Barton http://phy5ics.com/blog/2008/07/24/thanks-for-all-the-fish/ I greatly appreciate everyone’s comments and input on my article on Bluetooth and GPS
.  It is quite nice to have the exposure from Make and also to have one’s efforts peer reviewed as it leads to productive introspection around one’s work.

Allow me to respond to those who took the time to comment on my little project:

To Tam, David and Snoopy:
No, I didn’t actually short out the entire board by connecting VCC+ and GND.  That is a mistake in my first attempt to draw out a schematic in Illustrator.  So to those that are copying this project word-for-word - please don’t follow the diagram exactly.  I’ll update it in the next couple of days when I have a chance.  As an aside, I’d be curious to hear from others about what they use for drawing circuit diagrams.  I just use Illustrator because that’s what I know from my days long past as a designer.

To Siftah and Arto:
What I’ve done is most definitely available as a commercial product and most likely for less than I invested in the various components.  However, I just happen to be a nerd and am quite interested in learning from products and devices that may exist for an equal or greater price.

Because I cobbled my project together from off-the-shelf components, I can continually break down and re-combine any of the components I utilized into more-and-more interesting and complicated projects.  With a consumer product, I would be beholden to whatever the particular manufacturer of that consumer product dictated the functionality of a given device to be.

Additionally, while I’m not entirely familiar with what is on the market with regards to Bluetooth GPS devices, it’s much cooler, in my opinion, to be able to do whatever I want with the IMEA codes that I ingest and store from a piece of hardware via my own drivers and software as compared with what a GPS hardware/software vendor happens to expose via a crippled API in response to what their marketing team thinks that I might be interested in doing with said data that I collected via blood, sweat and tears on the trail.  Isn’t that why we all read and love Make?

Birds have dominated the sky since the day that they evolved to become flying creatures.  However, since man has gazed upon them, we have looked to them for  inspiration and in envy, often (unsuccessfully) invoking their form in an attempt to share the currents and soar above.  So, while I could theoretically transmute into a bird (or purchase one) to create an exact replica of something that already exists, by creating a reasonable facsimile I can learn how exactly it works, improve upon it and have fun doing it.

]]> http://phy5ics.com/blog/2008/07/24/thanks-for-all-the-fish/feed/ Bluetooth + GPS + ActionScript - Part 1 - Hardware http://phy5ics.com/blog/2008/03/16/bluetooth-gps-actionscript-part-1-hardware/ http://phy5ics.com/blog/2008/03/16/bluetooth-gps-actionscript-part-1-hardware/#comments Sun, 16 Mar 2008 17:37:19 +0000 Barton as3bluetoothgpsphysical computing http://phy5ics.com/blog/2008/03/16/bluetooth-gps-actionscript-part-1-hardware/ 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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]]> http://phy5ics.com/blog/2008/03/16/bluetooth-gps-actionscript-part-1-hardware/feed/ Remount an External Hard Drive in Leopard http://phy5ics.com/blog/2008/03/14/remount-an-external-hard-drive-in-leopard/ http://phy5ics.com/blog/2008/03/14/remount-an-external-hard-drive-in-leopard/#comments Sat, 15 Mar 2008 01:27:14 +0000 Barton http://phy5ics.com/blog/2008/03/14/remount-an-external-hard-drive-in-leopard/ 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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]]> http://phy5ics.com/blog/2008/03/14/remount-an-external-hard-drive-in-leopard/feed/ Arithmetik Garden http://phy5ics.com/blog/2007/10/29/arithmetik-garden/ http://phy5ics.com/blog/2007/10/29/arithmetik-garden/#comments Mon, 29 Oct 2007 21:57:07 +0000 Barton physical computingrfid http://phy5ics.com/blog/2007/10/29/arithmetik-garden/ 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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]]> http://phy5ics.com/blog/2007/10/29/arithmetik-garden/feed/ Flex 3 + AIR + RFID + AMFPHP + SMS http://phy5ics.com/blog/2007/10/13/flex-3-air-rfid-amfphp-sms/ http://phy5ics.com/blog/2007/10/13/flex-3-air-rfid-amfphp-sms/#comments Sun, 14 Oct 2007 04:30:38 +0000 Barton airas3flexrfid http://phy5ics.com/blog/2007/10/13/flex-3-air-rfid-amfphp-sms/ 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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]]> http://phy5ics.com/blog/2007/10/13/flex-3-air-rfid-amfphp-sms/feed/ Make Controller, mchelper 2.0 and /serial/ Issues http://phy5ics.com/blog/2007/10/02/make-controller-mchelper-20-and-serial-subsytem-issues/ http://phy5ics.com/blog/2007/10/02/make-controller-mchelper-20-and-serial-subsytem-issues/#comments Wed, 03 Oct 2007 04:06:34 +0000 Barton make controllerosc http://phy5ics.com/blog/2007/10/02/make-controller-mchelper-20-and-serial-subsytem-issues/ 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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]]> http://phy5ics.com/blog/2007/10/02/make-controller-mchelper-20-and-serial-subsytem-issues/feed/ Starting Over with the Make Controller + AS3 - Part 1 http://phy5ics.com/blog/2007/09/08/starting-over-with-the-make-controller-as3-part-1/ http://phy5ics.com/blog/2007/09/08/starting-over-with-the-make-controller-as3-part-1/#comments Sat, 08 Sep 2007 19:22:49 +0000 Barton as3make controllerosc http://phy5ics.com/blog/2007/09/08/starting-over-with-the-make-controller-as3-part-1/ 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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]]> http://phy5ics.com/blog/2007/09/08/starting-over-with-the-make-controller-as3-part-1/feed/ Flex 2 and WSDL Overloading http://phy5ics.com/blog/2007/08/21/flex-2-and-wsdl-overloading/ http://phy5ics.com/blog/2007/08/21/flex-2-and-wsdl-overloading/#comments Tue, 21 Aug 2007 21:55:11 +0000 Barton flex 2soasoapweb serviceswsdl http://phy5ics.com/blog/2007/08/21/flex-2-and-wsdl-overloading/ 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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]]> http://phy5ics.com/blog/2007/08/21/flex-2-and-wsdl-overloading/feed/ AS3 + Make Controller Important Update (AKA Not Part 5) http://phy5ics.com/blog/2007/08/20/as3-make-controller-important-update-aka-not-part-5/ http://phy5ics.com/blog/2007/08/20/as3-make-controller-important-update-aka-not-part-5/#comments Tue, 21 Aug 2007 03:13:41 +0000 Barton as3floscfwiidommake controller http://phy5ics.com/blog/2007/08/20/as3-make-controller-important-update-aka-not-part-5/ 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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]]> http://phy5ics.com/blog/2007/08/20/as3-make-controller-important-update-aka-not-part-5/feed/ Flash Player + SSL + IE7 = WTF (and a solution) http://phy5ics.com/blog/2007/08/14/flash-player-ssl-ie7-wtf-and-a-solution/ http://phy5ics.com/blog/2007/08/14/flash-player-ssl-ie7-wtf-and-a-solution/#comments Wed, 15 Aug 2007 01:05:30 +0000 Barton as3crossdomain.xmlflash playerflexhttpsie7 http://phy5ics.com/blog/2007/08/14/flash-player-ssl-ie7-wtf-and-a-solution/ 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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