Arduino - Flash connection

Ok everyone, so here are some screencapture tutorials on how to connect Arduino to Flash. For the sake of simplicity, I set all the examples up to be reading 4 buttons. For now I will only be showing you how to have arduino as an input to flash and not the bi-directional communication between the 2. Its very possible, but I would focus on getting 1 way traffic to work before making it more complex.
I'm sure that there will be questions, but I only ask that you post the questions here rather than email so that everyone can benefit from the answer and I don't have to repeat myself.


Here's the overall setup of how it works:

-The code in Arduino sends the data over USB by using the Serial.print() command
-The Serial Proxy Program receives the data from the USB port and connects it to an internal port that flash can read.
-The information is then unpackaged and applied in Flash.


Step 1- download the files HERE





Important Notes on the Arduino Code:

-baudRate that it is communicating at: In our case 9600
-the order that you are collecting the button info in




The Serial Proxy must be running BEFORE the flash file

Network Port: 9001
Serial Port: Find out from Arduino on mac it will be the usbserial-XXX one
Speed: 9600

Input all these settings BEFORE you hit Start

if it works it will say:
Listening on port 9001…
opened com port usbserial-XXXXX



Flash example 1


This example is a basic test, once splitting the incoming values into our Array called input. we can then apply it.

such that
input[0] = button1value
input[1] = button2value
input[2] = button3value
input[3] = button4value


the if statements are constantly updating so when it receives a buttons value as 1 it moves the movieclip to pixel 350 and when it receives 0 it moves it to pixel 36.


the way you can do that is by giving each movieclip an instance name:

I called them button_1,button_2,button_3,button_4

and the syntax to move them in x is button_1._x = ?
the value is the pixel value on the screen.


Flash example 2.



This example expands the complexity slightly to use the buttons as a trigger. The way it does that is by storing the previous value so we can have an animation play only on the time when it switches, Otherwise it would keep starting the animation an not let it finish.

This same example could really easily be changed to play audio or load another movieClip. You would just change the code after the If Statements.