A world in dk(decay/denmark)

A course Im taking requires that we use flash and we are left to using specific workstations at school or download a 30 day trial for the 6-7 week project. And well either way we are supposed to be using a proprietary piece of software from Adobe.

The first flash assignment were to create a picture slide show, with captions and a soundtrack. Using the Adobe flash gui its very easy, drag and drop “programming”.

But as Richard Stallman says “its not a matter of convenience, but of ethics”. So I went looking for replacements. In another course I had no problems using octave instead of matlab, so should this be any different? Yes, unfortunately it seems that its very difficult to get the needed features in free software, well at least in the given timeframe.

HaXe is able to compile to swf, as well as doing a lot of other nifty stuff. I just learnt about it recently from this video.

I didn’t manage to make the entire assignment, (yet?) in haxe, but i did make this :
flash presentation(5MB+)

UPDATE

I did manage to add sound and captions.

So how did I do it?

Well first of all i installed haxe and swfmill. Haxe is able to use the actionsscript api and swfmill can create resources so your are able to refference them in you haxe code.Here is the recipe i used to create this slideshow.

1. create a xml file for swfmill, in order to create a resources for the haxe code.This i something like

 <movie width="480" height="480" framerate="25">

   <frame>

      <library><clip id="img1" import="library/newton001Slide_.png"/>

unfortunately swfmill isn’t able to add sound to a library, so that had to be loaded directly from a file. I had some trouble getting it to function on the server but i think that adding “-D network-sandbox” to the haxe compilation might have done something. ???

2. run swfmill, thats swfmill simple slides.xml slides.swf

now i had linkage names for the image files, and could add them to the movieClip.

3. Create file SlideShow.hx

The main part. The basic haxe syntax is pretty straightforward, but since it uses the actionscript api it were mostly a question of getting a hang of actionscript. I did however strugle a bit with making a anonymous function, for the sounds onLoad. I used “static inline function sndStart(succes){…}” , its a wee bit diffrent than what i would do in java. but it works.

3. compile.

make a “make file” for haxe, compile.hxml

-swf test.swf

-main SlideShow

-swf-lib slides.swf

-swf-header 480:480:25:FFFFFF

-D network-sandbox

The last part -D is a conditional flag and as far as i can tell it shouldn’t do anything, but a saw it in Fmp3PlayerHx and when i added it the sound seemed to work from the server, using a URL :s :s

4. run haxe compile.hxml

5. display the pretty result. (try not to go crazy when wordpress decides to help you format the html code….), at first i tried embedding the flash in this post, but wordpress kept on changing the code, apparently if you add code and have newlines between the tags it throws in a couple og <p> tags …..

Now its on a separate page, then you don’t have to download the 5 mb flash file just to view the page, and I can use wordpress with out getting too frustrated.

sourcecode slideShow.hx

The music is “the free software song” this version is by Jono Bacon , and I personally prefer it to the version by Richard Stallman

I saw this cool sound sequencer ( arduino punk console ). I don’t much about sound and that kind of stuff, but i thought it was quite nifty. And I had just gotten a ps2-mouse to work with the arduino. And hmmm, I had to use it for something. So why not try to make a sound sequencer with it ?

So I started hacking away. Unfortunately I don’t have any nice video or sound clip, but then again its more like a noisemaker and its just a mess of wires. I’ll try to get something up soon.

But it does work, you have to take my word for it or download the sourcecode and wire up your arduino and try it out.

How does it work ?

There a two modes of operation “play mode” or “sequencing mode”, and it shift between modes by clicking the middelbutton (mousewheel button) and it starts out in sequence mode.

sequencing mode

• moving the mouse changes the frequency of the sound. It’s very simple the more you move, the more it changes (just by (X + Y) *magic_number)
• pressing the right mouse button reduces the duration of the sound
• pressing the left mouse button increases the duration
• turning the mousewheel selects a tone in the sequence, either an existing or adds a new one to the sequence.

play mode

• it plays the sequence of tones you’ve recorded.
• the mouse wheel changes the playback speed.

So it keeps track of both a duration and a frequency, it uses a queue and its possible to add sounds to both ends. I haven’t yet hit a maximum but since its in a int array my guess is that it should be able to hold a lot 100 or 1000 of tones. And it should be possible to do some bytepacking to reduce the memory requirements, but since you have to enter each sound manually and there are no persistent storage you really don’t need that to hold a lot of tones.

Sound Sequencing Mouse sourcecode

I have been tinkering a bit with the arduino the last couple of days. Mostly small experiments with some of the junk had around, after some frustrations with a circuit for a rotary encoder, i “gave up” and tried hooking up a ps2 mouse. There are a nice tutorial at the arduino playground. It seemed complicated to interface with a mouse this way. But it proved to be so much easier than trying to build a circuit. The software coding is so much easier than the electrical circuits.

It was a matter of connecting 4 wires and uploading the code to get it running. But then i found out that there wasn’t support for the mouse-wheel, so i googled the datasheet for the IC, and started hacking. I ended up getting the mousewheel to function and getting output for the buttons. Along the way I refactored some of code, in order to better understand what was happening.

I still haven’t figured out what I should use the mouse for, but it was a fun hack.

Here is the sourcecode, if you want to try something with it : ps2mouse for arduino

I tried to make nice comments so it should be very straightforward to work with. As mentioned a haven’t made most of the code, just some additions and refactoring.

The mouse and the annoying encoder i couldn’t build a circuit for. It can be attached to a motor where there are a slotted wheel.

(21 nov updated code)