I was recently inspired ( once again ) by Kevin Hoyt at the Adobe MAX unconference which was put on by FITC and Influxus. Kevin gave a talk about physical computing which showed off a few examples of real world programming. This is where you use your developer know-how to interact with the world outside of the computer for a change. We had recently been talking at work about how we needed to build a robot, so the timing couldn’t have been better.
After recently upgrading to Snow Leopard I found that most of the getting started information was outdated for getting Flash to talk to the Arduino. I’ll show you what I did so I can hopefully save you some time. Less Googleing (is that a word?) and more tinkering.
What you need to get started
- Arduino micro controller board
- Ebay
- Maker Shed this is what I picked up
- I also use the Adafruit Proto Sheild which basically extends the power outs and grounds of your Arduino (among other useful things) which makes wiring up ideas much easier. I highly recommend getting one.
- Arduino IDE You will need this for uploading your initial firmware to the board. It also has the USB drivers needed for communication over a socket packaged with it on the disk image.
- Actionscript 3 development environment of some sort
- Flash 30 day trial
- Flex SDK is what I use with Textmate and Simon Gregory’s bundles
- Flash Builder
- AS3 Glue The library for interfacing between Flash and Arduino
- Firmata This is all that needs to be uploaded to your Arduino in order for AS3 Glue to do it’s magic
- TinkerProxy 2 OSX Download link the updated proxy for talking to your Arduino over a serial port connection
*I saved all of these into a new Arduino directory under Documents. I like having all of my related assets in the same directory.
