I have been developing for the Flash platform since 1998. Throughout the years, I have read and heard endless commentary on the death of Flash. Groups of people hate it, are annoyed by it, complain that it crashes their computer, that it has no place in the mobile space, that it steals your girlfriend and eats your Cheerios. I mean come on, its probably the only client side language that is treated like a red...

As I get more and more involved in interactive installations, I seem to come across things that inspire me and invigorates my passion to perform. Trafik a French creative studio combines the arts of design and coding very beautifully. The Sonic Cube, a large illuminated canvas box shown recently at the contemporary art center, La Ferme du Buisson in Paris, is an interactive application that reacts to sound....

(continued from Arduino & Flash AS3 (part 4)). At this point you should have the Arduino communicating with Flash. Unplug the Arduino from the USB cable. We are now going to build this simple button circuit : Grab your bread board, button, resistor and jumper wires and lets build a button. The button schematic is quite simple, but for some it may seem daunting, so I broke down the symbols. The following...

(continued from Arduino & Flash AS3 (part 3)). Bring the NOISE! This post originally started from a conversation I had with a fellow Flash engineer who attended my past exhibition. In my last exhibition I created an Arduino based synth in which users could interact with. So in keeping with the audio spirit, I decided to show you guys how you could easily control an mp3 in Flash with the Arduino micro-controller...

(continued from Arduino & Flash AS3 (part 2)). If you have successfully uploaded a sketch to your Arduino, it’s time to configure the Serial Proxy Application. Install the Serial Proxy application. After the installation, navigate to the folder where you installed the application and open the serproxy.cfg using your text editor. Update your file with the following information : # Example configuration...

(continued from Arduino & Flash AS3 (part 1)). It’s time to test your Arduino board. Install the Arduino IDE. Unzip and place the Arduino IDE into your Applications folder. Install the FTDI serial driver for your platform. Connect your Arduino board via USB to your computer and open up the Arduino IDE. Go to Tools->Serial Port. On the Mac, choose the entry that reads /dev/tty.usbserial-XXXXXXXX. If...

At my last interactive exhibition, I was asked how would a Flash engineer get started with tinkering with the Arduino. Well, it’s fairly simple, their are a few caveats to overcome, but for the most part all you have to do is acquire the hardware and install some open source software, and oh yeah own a copy of flash or an ActionScript compiler. This post will be covered in 5 parts to help you get Flash...