Physical Computing

June 18th, 2008 • Physical Computing

In times of multitouch tables and the wii alternative navigaton methods and interfaces are getting more and more attractive. Therefore I wanted to provide a few links to help those who are not very familiar with electronics but can’t keep their hands off playing with hardware stuff (like me). In the end it’s a very good feeling to connect your poorly soldered stuff to the computer to get some outputs on the screen, always hoping not to destroy the expensive electronical components or even worse the whole flat.

First of all you should get an easy-to-use prototyping platform like arduino (http://arduino.cc/), wiring (http://wiring.org.co), freeduino (http://www.freeduino.org/) … the arduino board is not very expensive and there are a lot of tutorials how to use it and how to connect other hardware to it.

getting started with electronics and arduino:

• Learn Electronics using Arduino (http://www.ladyada.net/learn/arduino/)
  
• Tutorials in german (http://www.physical-computing.de/)
• Tutorials by the Stanford HCI Group (http://protolab.pbwiki.com/)
• ITP Physical Computing (http://itp.nyu.edu/physcomp/)
• Tom Igoe (http://www.tigoe.net/pcomp/)

another good source of inspiration is flickr. just search for »arduino« and you’ll find a lot of cool projects, links and working circuits.

AsDoc with FDT

June 5th, 2008 • 8 comments ActionScript, Flash
Tags: AS3, AsDoc

AsDoc is a very useful tool for documenting the API of your classes particularly if you work in a team. Unfortunately it is not implemented in FDT but as it is a command line tool and included in the Flex 3 SDK you can use it via an ant buildfile. The following examples are for Mac OSX users but it should work on Windows with a few changes as well. Read more »