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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Please be sure to read Part 2, and download the classes from that example otherwise the following example will not work as expected.

This article will cover how to read OSC messages that are sent from the Make Controller into FLOSC and then into Flash using the modified FWiidom classes. Before getting started, this is where I have to point out that the manner in which the Flash Player receives the XML converted from OSC is by polling FLOSC, which is far from ideal. Polling is an inefficient and wasteful way of checking to see if any state has changed on the controller. This, however, is the way that OSC works - by querying the connected device to determine if the state of any inputs has changed. I’m not sure if this characteristic applies to the Make Controller in general, if for example, using other protocols over USB, but I have a feeling that it doesn’t. I’ll have to look at some of the code written for the controller in other languages and also read up on OSC to determine if this is the case. In any case, we’re stuck with polling in ActionScript.

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In attempting to wire up a slide potentiometer to the Make Controller and poll for its values using AS3, which was supposed to be Part 2 of this series of articles, I ran into a significant problem. (To understand what exactly I was trying to do, check out Getting Started with AS3 and the Make Controller - Part 3 - Determining Input Values.) After coding up my example for the article in AS3, I expected that when publishing the .SWF, everything would be working, right? No, of course not. That would be far too easy. After checking and double-checking my code thinking that I probably just did something stupid while working on it late at night, I was stumped. I slept on it and still couldn’t figure it out. After much frustration, I opted to revert back to AS2 to see if maybe there was an issue with the potentiometer and re-wrote the example using AS2 and the MakingThings AS2 classes and it worked a treat.

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A couple months back I picked up a Make Controller from Making Things to do some experimentation with Flash Media Server and physical computing. I’m just now getting around to writing up my experiences about getting set up with the Make Controller. While the tutorial on the Making Things site was great for getting started using AS2 with their .mxp extension, it didn’t offer up anything on how to get started with what I really wanted to do, which was a project that would benefit from the performance of AS3 and Flash Player 9, so I had to take matters into my own hands.

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I gave a brief talk to the Schematic tech team here in LA on some of what I learned at the onAIR event earlier in the week. While I talked plenty about the new features of AIR from a variety of perspectives, I felt that the introduction of a technology like AIR required a different perspective and more time to explain it. An interesting aspect to the introduction of AIR is that is has significantly lowered the barrier to entry for developers interested in developing desktop applications. While this has the powerful effect of democratizing access to the desktop, it does raise some fundamental issues and fears.

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I just attended Adobe’s on AIR Bus Tour the other day on its stop in Los Angeles. While typically those types of event don’t delve deep enough into details to be of much interest, I figured that I’d attend anyway since I’ve been away from the computer for so long on vacation and needed to catch up on some new stuff. The vast majority of the talks were JavaScript-centric which was interesting and perhaps highlights Adobe’s desire to sway over the current generation of standards- and open-source centric client-side developers to a proprietary technology, but more on that in another post.

Anyway, I had hopes of converting an app that I had been working on over to an AIR app for desktop deployment. The app that I was going to port over was a quick and rather silly app that I threw together using the Yahoo! Maps API and an geoRSS feed constructed using Yahoo! Pipes to filter earthquake data from the USGS. However, I quickly remembered that developing against an alpha release of anything can be tedious at best.

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The goal of this article is to relate several strategies and technologies to improve the efficiency in the collection, analysis and presentation of field data. I have limited the suggestions to only technologies that are free (but not necessarily open-source) and/or utilize public APIs so as to make them accessible to an audience who constantly finds their budgets diminishing. However, prior to getting into that, allow me to relate the context of some of these recommendations…

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