LICENSE

The Sentinel project is a mashup of ideas and is based on several freely available AS3 libraries. You can do whatever you like with it as long as you don’t sell it. If you do create a unit, please let us know.

INSTALLATION

The Orbitron font and AS3 libraries are included. You’ll need an Arduino board and a webcam to get it started. From there you’ll also need a NERF Vulcan, a few servos, etc. A tutorial is in the works to get it all going, but you can start looking around now and seeing how things work.

FUTURE

• Tutorials on how to create your own base/stand, configure Arduino, making it all sing, etc.
• OpenCV integration for face tracking
• Moving in the X and Y axis without buying a $800 base. The jury is still out on how this is going to be done affordably.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I’d like to thank Jack Doyle, Justin Windle, Grant Skinner, Björn Hartmann, and Matt Przybylski for making their awesome AS3 libraries publicly available for the Flash community.

CONTACT

If you have any questions, please contact us at: info@thebiggerdesign.com

Download The Sentinel Source Code from Google Code

Here’s the video that aired during the AdobeMAX Day 2 Keynote:

NERF Sentinel from AdobeMAX Keynote from The Bigger Design on Vimeo.

Once through with the keynote, it was off to a few sessions on GoogleTV, new 3D technology for Flash Player, multi-player gaming, and more. Check out all the sessions for AdobeMAX on AdobeTV.

In addition to a great conference, the amount of goodies acquired was epic. All attendees received a Droid 2 phone from Motorola and a Logitech Revue from Google. This is in addition to thumb drives, water bottles, Flex books, etc.

Additionally, here are a few pics we took while out in Los Angeles:

If you’re at AdobeMAX and want to see more of the Sentinel, message @thebiggerdesign and we can arrange a demo in the pavillion.

This was part of a larger presentation given at this past spring’s Columbia Adobe User Group / Refresh Columbia double-feature meetup. Here’s another short video demonstration of the Sentinel from the meeting, courtesy of Greg Lunn.

Now we’re brushing off the cobwebs and bringing the Sentinel project back into the spotlight. Over the next few weeks, we’ll break the project down, describe its biggest challenges and how we solved them. If there’s enough interest, we’ll get your trigger finger itching with details on how you can roll your own.

Check out our Sentinel photos on Flickr.

Simply take your MovieClip’s instance name and set the attribute buttonMode to true. Now when you publish your movie, rolling over the MovieClip changes your cursor.

Here’s where it gets tricky. Let’s say there’s a MovieClip in your library that needs to be used several times to contain text, such as a list of buttons. You set up the MovieClip as a class to re-use, you pull in the XML content to each class using a for loop, and then add it to the stage with buttonMode set to true. Now here comes the pain in the neck. When you hover the mouse over the MovieClip you get the cursor change, but when you move the mouse over the part of the MovieClip with the text, bye-bye cursor change.

This result is due the default behavior of text with the cursor. To disable this behavior, set the textfield inside the MovieClip to this:

Presto! Now your MovieClip behaves like a button, the cursor is not affected by the text, and you don’t have to give Flash the finger.

iMust

First up is iMust, an iPhone app from Happy Gravity Media/Blitz Media. The iMust app is critical if you need to say something during a meeting, but don’t know exactly what to say. Actually, it’s what not to say. This tongue-in-cheek app pipes out sound bites that are sure to infuriate the party on the other side of the table. Here’s a screengrab:

Get the app on iTunes. It’s FREE!

The Vendor/Client Relationship in a Real World Situation

A funny take on how the vendor/client relationship would translate into real world situations.

Make the Logo Bigger

Lastly, there is this gem that appeared a few years ago. Designers spend so much time making logos fit nicely into their designs only to have clients foil them with the request to “Make the Logo Bigger”.
Download “Make the Logo Bigger”

The Intensity card is HDMI only, while the Intensity Pro has a breakout cable for analog connections. Neither has SDI. My email into tech support got this response:

We know, it was an error in the compiling of the driver. That should be fixed shortly, please uninstall that driver version and use the older version until we are able to fix that. It shouldn’t take over day or so to get that straightened out.

So Blackmagic knew about it and released the drivers anyway. Oh, and downgrading doesn’t do anything either as I need CS4 compatibility. The waiting game continues…

An email to BMD support yielded this response:

"We are waiting for one last thing from Adobe to be sorted and then we should
be able to finalize our CS4 drivers. I’ve heard that this hopefully will
happen soon and then once we get that last issue ironed out the CS4 drivers
should be released. No timeframe for when that will happen but hopefully
soon."

So now I’m high and dry until Adobe gets itself in gear. Or I could fork out the cash for Final Cut Studio.

UPDATE: BMD just released the drivers for Windows. What about your Mac customers?

What you’ll need:

• A working copy of Maya 2009. There’s a trial version available as well.
  
• XCode (You’ll need the latest release, not what’s on the Leopard DVD- it won’t work in this case.)
• The Boost Library – Version 1.36.0
• COLLADAMaya Plugin 0.8.2
  

The entire process will take less than an hour, but the user involvement is rather low.

1. Install COLLADAMaya Plug-in
   Download the Maya plug-in disc image, mount, and install using the supplied package. Once the plug-in is installed, open Maya and navigate to Window –> Settings/Preferences –> Plug-in Manager. You will see a list of all available plug-ins. Choose “Loaded” next to COLLADAMaya.bundle.

   

   You’ll notice you receive an error, like this:

   Library not loaded: libboost_filesystem-xgcc40-mt-1_36.dylib
   Referenced from: /Users/Shared/Autodesk/maya/2009/plug-ins/COLLADAMaya.bundle
   

   This is the error we’re going to fix in the next steps.

2. Install XCode
   Download the XCode image from Apple’s Developer site. It’s about 1GB in size. The default settings are all you need if you don’t plan on doing anything else with it. This is the biggest issue with this workaround. It will take up about 1GB of space.
3. Install the Boost Library
   Download the Boost Library 1.36.0. Newer libraries may work, but this is the library that the plugin was compiled against in the development stage. Select the version that ends in .tar.gz. This made a difference for me, though I’m not exactly sure why. I recommend you extract the contents to the Desktop. Open Terminal, which can be found in /Applications/Utilities. To get going you need to configure the installation procedure before installing.

   In the terminal you’ll need to navigate to the Boost folder on the Desktop. Obviously if you extracted elsewhere, navigate there. Here are some Terminal commands for rookies. Once you have successfully navigated inside the Boost folder, type:

   ./configure

   This will start the configuration script. It takes a minute or two to complete. Once complete, type:

   sudo make install

   Enter your password and hit enter. Now is the time for a break, especially since it takes about 20 minutes to unpack these files. When it finally finishes you will be given a message that the library was successfully installed.

4. Re-Enable Plug-in
   Return to Maya and re-enable the plug-in. See Step 1 to review. You should not get an error message this time around. Success!

Now you are free to model and export your your work to COLLADA for use in your Papervision3D Flash projects. Here are the settings I use to export my work:

For those just getting their feet wet in Papervision3D and would like to see how their work looks in a Flash movie, try out Mr. doob’s Papervision3D Previewer.

I hope this post is helpful to those few users who were in my shoes. Leave a comment and let me know how it worked out.