I went to my first meeting of the New York City Flashcoders user group last night. I have been a member of the mailing list for a few months now and figured that it was time to meet the actual people behind the site. The Flashcoders user group appears to be one of the more active flash communities in the NYC area. In fact, this group of multimedia professionals meet about once a week to discuss and display cool new Flash based projects and tools. The meeting last night was about using Arduino in conjunction with Flash actionscript.
Arduino is an open-source physical computing platform that can be used to develop stand-alone interactive objects to connect to software, like Flash, on your computer . The open-source IDE can be downloaded for free and is currently available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. This basically means that you can develop applications in Flash that can then be use to control real world objects like lights, sound, or any electronic device that can receive input signals. Information on interfacing Ardiuno boards with Flash can be found here.
The session last night was a mix off lecture, hands on tinkering, and just plain old socializing. It was obvious to me that most of the people knew one another. I felt a little out of place being the new guy on the scene. I was dog tired from the Microsoft IT Tech trends seminar that we had run at LaGuardia earlier in the day. As a result I gotta admit that I was alot more reserved than usual. Still it was a good meeting and everyone was really nice and welcoming.
I graduated from the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University a few years back, at the time when Physical Computing was just starting to really take off. Watching the demonstration last night made me think of my time at grad school and how it might be time to check in with some of my old friends and professors at ITP.