Hi flexcoders, I wanted to drop a note to tell you about an Air app I just built that has a couple unique features. I built it to be a desktop app for Arduino ( http://arduino.cc) devices. If you're not familiar with Arduino it's an open source microelectronics hardware platform. It makes it easy to program micros to do things like attach sensors, control motors, robotics, etc. The possibilities are endless, and the Arduino subculture has really exploded in the last few years.
If you're already a Flex dev. that likes messing with Arduino, this may be interesting to you. This app allows you to scan and connect to an Arduino-derivative, and connect to it via Bluetooth Serial Port Profile. It also provides a visual App Store where you can browse and download an app specific to your hardware, and the types of sensors you may have plugged into it. So, for example, you could plug an infrared temperature sensor into the device, and then go grab an app that works with that device and temp. sensor and download it. An app (may) consist of two parts: a) Firmware for the microcontroller b) A SWF module that can be dynamically loaded into the desktop container These two components are meant to work with each other. The firmware can control things on the device or read sensors and report values, and the module is a UI that allows you to interact with the firmware. So, you can program the device over the air using bluetooth, and load the module into the desktop application container, and now you have a re-configurable microcontroller that you can easily write, share, and deploy software to. Here's some screenshots of the app: http://daisyworks.com/downloads.html - and you can download it there; although it probably isn't all that useful unless you have the hardware. I wrote some tutorials here: http://daisyworks.com/docs.html on how to write your own firmware and UI for it. The UI part should be very easy for the anyone on this mailing list. The firmware part is also trivially easy even if you've never done it before. --- a few technical details about the app's design for anyone curious: * native installer for all 3 operating systems -- ant build script that will create the installer executable with one command * uses http://swizframework.org heavily, b/c I love swiz :) You might be wondering how Air is interfacing with Bluetooth...that was the kind of tricky part. I created an executable jar with an embedded Jetty server. The Jetty server exposes BlazeDS services using Spring-Flex. This is actually kind of cool b/c you can launch a full-fledged Java/BlazeDS server just by double-clicking a jar file. The installer packages the jar with it, and when that app bootstraps itself, it starts the jar file itself and starts communicating with it. I use the bluecove java library to scan/find/connect Bluetooth devices. On the App Store, we just download the .hex firmware image and the .swf. We can now program the Arduino-derivative with the .hex file, and load the .swf module into a container. The application container provides the Tx/Rx communication between the SWF module and the firmware on the device. Note: today this only works with our own Arduino derivative hardware -- we had to do a few tweaks to get the Firmware-Over-The-Air (FOTA) to work, but it wouldn't be that hard to extend it to work with other Arduino boards. Our boards work with the Arduino SDK/libraries so there is no difference from that standpoint. I plan to make it FOSS If you want to hack on some microelectronics and put your Flex skills to work building UIs for the device, come and check it out. Cheers, davis -- http://daisyworks.com
