The Wii Nunchuck is connected to my Arduino using I2C.

For now, the webcam is just a standard webcam with the housing removed, and connected via USB.

It uses  hacked up code from here and here.

(If you want to make something like this, Making Things Talk is an outstanding book.)

Here’s a sample video:

[update]: Hello Hack a Day people!

[update]: As Dokument says, here’s an almost identical setup created long before I did this.

[update]: If you don’t want to cut the end off your Wii Nunchuck, you can buy one of these.

I’ve not come close to exceeding the capacity of my Arduino Diecimila, so perhaps I’ll wait a while until getting this, but.. I want! 

Cool Components are selling them for £49 + VAT

Creating the Shopper 13 game sparked my enthusiasm, and I’ve been gathering new parts to experiment with:

In addition to that, I’ve also got a Wii Nunchuck hooked up to my Arduino which I’m currently controlling Flash and Servos via the accelerometer and analog joystick. Oh, and a Laser.. and some Papervision too. When I’ve got something interesting, I’ll post it. Hopefully that’ll be in the next few days

Well I have to start building my robot army somewhere..

Each pot is responsible for either the pitch, yaw, or roll of a cube in PV3D.

Simple stuff that’s been done before! I think I need to think of something a bit more interesting now

Here’s the on-screen result:

The very simple circuit:

Video:

I need to get some better potentiometers, these are pretty rubbish.

Yey for making … stuff!

For me, the most interesting aspect is using the Arduino in conjunction with Flash, sending and recieiving data betwen the two. I realy like the twitter > flash > arduino > LCD display that Mario made. I found it quite inspirational.

Getting Flash and the Arduino talking is initially very, very easy. It takes no time at all to initially write your first “hello world” app – in this case a blinking LED. After that, I turned my attention to reading the output of a potentiometer, and display that in Flash. Again, this is very easy, espically when people have done it already, and you can copy and paste their code! Thanks Beltran, Brett, and Aral for sharing your code!
In no time I had a potentiometer controlling the brightness of an LED, and the Arduino writing the data to the serial port, which Flash was trace()ing to the output window.

Nothing’s that easy though, right? Indeed. I’m expecting values between 0 and 1023, and specifically in this instance, around 1023. This is what I got:

15:37:53:104 = 102
15:37:53:135 = 3
15:37:54:104 = 1023
15:37:55:119 = 1023
15:37:56:135 = 1023
15:37:57:119 = 102
15:37:57:135 = 3
15:37:58:119 = 1023
15:37:59:135 = 1023
15:38:0:151 = 1023
15:38:1:135 = 10
15:38:1:151 = 23
15:38:2:151 = 1023

How strange. As you can see, occasionally the output is split over more than one line. It also does the same on my laptop.
After a lot of hair-pulling, I’ve made a couple of examples, which you can test if you wish. You’ll need to change the port to the one serproxy (or equivalent) is set up to use.

Arduino code:
[code]
void setup()
{
Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop()
{
Serial.println("hello");
delay(100);
}
[/code]

Actionscript 3 code:
[code]
import flash.events.*;
import flash.net.Socket;

trace("__AS3 Example__");
var socket:Socket = new Socket("localhost",5335);
socket.addEventListener(ProgressEvent.SOCKET_DATA, socketDataHandler);
function socketDataHandler(event:ProgressEvent):void {
var now = new Date();
trace(now.getHours()+":"+now.getMinutes()+":"+now.getSeconds()+":"+now.getMilliseconds()+" = "+socket.readUTFBytes(socket.bytesAvailable));
}
[/code]

Actionscript 2 code:
[code]
trace("__AS2 Example__");
var socket:XMLSocket = new XMLSocket();
socket.connect("localhost",5335);
socket.onData = function (data) {
var now = new Date();
trace(now.getHours()+":"+now.getMinutes()+":"+now.getSeconds()+":"+now.getMilliseconds()+" = "+data);
}

[/code]

AS3 Output:

12:10:43:140 = hello

12:10:43:234 = hel
12:10:43:250 = lo

12:10:43:359 = hello

12:10:43:453 = h
12:10:43:453 = ello

12:10:43:562 = hello

AS2 Output:

12:11:25:406 = hello

12:11:25:515 = hello

12:11:25:625 = hello

12:11:25:718 = hello

12:11:25:812 = hello

12:11:25:921 = hello

AS3 has odd output, and AS2 has the expected output. It’s almost as if ProgressEvent.SOCKET_DATA is called too frequently?
I’ve looked at this, which may be a similar problem. Here’s my post on the Arduino forum which I wrote as I experienced the problem.

In the end I found AS3Glue, which “is an ActionScript 3 library that enables communication between Flash/Flex/AIR applications and Arduino boards”. This changes the way in which AS3 and the Arduino communicate, and fortunately solves the problem described above.

If you use AS3glue, you’ll also need to use the Arduino Firmata firmware. The firmware page also briefly mentions:

It turns out that the USB-serial drivers are optimized for fast bulk data transfer, and those optimizations actually wreak havoc with the timing of the messages over the USB-serial.

Perhaps that’s the problem i’ve experienced? If I can, i’d like to find out exactly what’s going on, but for now, as3glue will suffice
If you can, please have a test and let me know if you get the same output!