Joe Pietruch's Blog

James Alexander and I worked together on “Bullrider” for our Physical Computing class. Our assignment was called “Project Runway.” Our task was to create a wearable project that had integrated sensors.

Jim had an inflatable bull riding costume from a previous Halloween party that was perfect for this project. We placed an Arduino in the hat, which took readings from an accelerometer. We also attached terminals to a grip-strengthener exercise thingamajig that would sense when it was held closed, and topped that piece of hardware off with a reset pushbutton.

The goal was to simulate a bull ride for the user wearing the costume. To begin the ‘game’ they close the grip-strengthener (simulating a tight hold on the rope) and keep it closed. On screen, there are two fields above and below a graphic representation of the bull. When the user jumps, it moves the graphic of the bull up and down accordingly. The fields gradually move apart, and the user must jump higher and higher to touch both of them. If the user fails to maintain a steady grip, or fails to touch the fields at a certain interview, he has fallen off the bull.

Below I’ve included the on-screen portion of this project. It differs only by means of user input. Instead of holding the grip-strengthener, the user must press the spacebar. Instead of jumping, the user must move the mouse up and down repeatedly.

Keep an eye out for photo and video of the actual project, as well as the link to a case study!

Bull Rider

It took some doing, but we got the Arduino to talk to Flash CS3 in a neat way. I’ve compiled that information here because I think it is useful and not explained well anywhere else.

First, you need to get Standard_Firmata.pde onto your Arduino. This is done just like any other Arduino sketch. Firmata provides the framework necessary to have read/write access the ports of the Arduino over the Serial connection. You can use any number of different programming languages to talk to the Arduino board without having to upload a different program to the board’s memory. Firmata rocks!

Second, (at least for Flash) you need to have a Serial Proxy running in the background. SerProxy functions as go-between for Arduino and Flash. Arduino speaks Serial messages, Flash speaks Socket Connection messages, and SerProxy acts as the bi-directional translator. SerProxy rocks!

Third, you need a Socket Connection in Flash. AS3Glue is a library of AS3 classes designed with this in mind, and includes built-in methods, properties and events for communicating with Arduino over the Socket-to-Serial path. The people over at protolab have adopted AS3Glue for their work, and have made a bunch of neat .fla files using the library.

At the end of this post, I’ve provided a screen shot of the base setup working, as well as a zip archive of the software you need to get started. It includes a quick readme to get you up to speed! Enjoy!

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