James Alliban

Arduino > Flash range sensor experiment

jamesalliban — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 09:29:54 +0000

I’ve been playing around with the Arduino microcontroller recently and this is my first experiment. It’s a prototype for a future artwork that essentially acts as a primitive touchscreen device. I’ve used 2 PING))) Ultrasonic Range Sensors positioned at the top of my monitor. These measure the distance of any object placed in front of them. The Arduino board collects this data and passes it on to Flash via SerProxy.

Click here to see the video on Vimeo
Click here to see the video on YouTube

For this project I used a modified version of David Cuartielles’ Arduino sketch and SerProxy as a Serial-to-Network Proxy Server. Here is my serproxy.cfg code.

# Config file for serproxy # See serproxy’s README file for documentation


# Transform newlines coming from the serial port into nils

# true (e.g. if using Flash) or false

newlines_to_nils=true
# Comm ports used

comm_ports=3
# Default settings

comm_baud=9600

comm_databits=8

comm_stopbits=1

comm_parity=none
# Idle time out in seconds

timeout=300

# Port 3 settings (ttyS2) net_port3=5333

I spent quite a lot of time trying to use Firmata, and AS3Glue but found that Firmata didn’t work with the PING Range Sensor. I’m fairly sure that AS3Glue requires the Board to be running Firmata so, as mentioned above, I settled for Arduino code from David Cuartielles. I wrote my own Actionscript to deal with the incoming data using the Socket and ByteArray classes. You can find an early rough version of this code here.

Wiimote Powered Self Portrait Generator

jamesalliban — Tue, 06 May 2008 09:26:21 +0000

This is my first experiment using the open source framework WiiFlash. It is an AIR application built using Flash in which the user can generate a Cubist self portrait by pointing a Wiimote at an Infrared light. Webcam footage is masked and layered using a variety of shapes and lines, the propeties of which can be altered using the Wiimote controls.

Click here to see the video on Vimeo
Click here to see the video on YouTube

The controls are as follows:

B adds shapes to the stage
A gives the pseudo random positioning effect
+ increases the scale of the shapes
- decreases the scale of the shapes
up/right increases the alpha of the lines
down/left decreases the alpha of the lines

The AIR app and source code will be available to download soon. You will however need a Wiimote, a bluetooth dongle, the WiiFlash server installed, a webcam and an Infrared light to use it.

First post

jamesalliban — Sun, 04 May 2008 08:24:54 +0000

Hello to you all.

I know, I know. Another flash blog. But this one is going to be cool I promise. But they all promise that. What will you offer that will make it so worthy of my fickle attention? Well, allow me to explain:

I like to move beyond the mouse and focus on the tangible side of Flash. Until recently, this was confined to using a webcam to create installation art but this is changing. The digital agency I work for, Skive, recognised this hunger in me and have generously bought me lots of interesting toys to play with such as Arduino boards, Wiimotes (see WiiFlash), Bluetooth devices, touchscreen devices (on the way) and more webcams.

So this blog is going to be used to track my progress as I play with these funky devices. I’ll be posting video footage of completed artworks, cut down interactive versions of some pieces, smaller scale experiments, tutorials for using/setting up some of these gadgets, source code and possibly a few links to anything else of interest that I find on my travels.