Someone has added DLDI support to my old TI-85 Emulator. I don’t have any exotic devices, so I can’t say how well it works.

You can download it here: ds85_r3.rar

There’s a forum thread about it going on here: teamcylops.com

Let me know if it works/doesn’t work on your particular device.

I have a prototype of the hardware side of my Nintendo DS-based heart rate monitor. I’m using the awesome DSerial to interface an IR LED & IR phototransistor to the DS.

It works ok, but the signal is not strong enough. Slight movements can make the data unusable. I think I need to work on either amplifying the signal, or increasing the sensitivity of the DSerial. Also I need to rig up some velcro to stick the sensor to your finger, so you don’t have to hold it in place.

Here you can see my “sensor”:

Here is the connection to the DS:

And finally, here is a screenshot of the DS’s lower screen, which is just graphing the data coming from the DSerial’s ADC:

Check out this movie of it in action: dserial_heart_monitor.avi (1.5MB)

A neat-looking device for DS homebrew development is natrium42’s DSerial. The features include

• 8051 microcontroller running at 24MHz
• Reprogrammable from DS, premade firmwares available
• Free development tools available
• 18 GPIO lines, 2 status LEDs
• UART with RS-232 level converter (can be disabled)
• Full-speed USB 2.0 device (does not support USB host)
• PWM and ADC available
• 2D tilt sensor

I’m hoping to make some cool stuff with it…my first plan is to build a portable heart monitor, that can also tell you how stressed-out you are, based on your ‘coherence’ (essentially you take the FFT of your heart rate over time, and you want most of the energy to fall near to 0.1Hz)

If you are looking to run Flex Builder 2 on Linux, see my original post.

I’ve made two minor updates for people using Flex Builder 2 on Linux. The first is to eliminate the annoying “Incorrect flash player installed…you have 0.0.0.0, and need 9.0.0.0″ that pops up every time you run a project. To fix it:

1. Download debugui.jar
2. Overwrite the file eclipse/plugins/com.adobe.flexbuilder.debug.ui_2.0.155577/debugui.jar with the downloaded one

The second minor update: I’ve noticed some very annoying bugs in the linux flash player (all reported to Adobe now of course), but in the mean time, I’ve been using the windows flash player under WINE, which does not have the same bugs. If you want to do this (which will probably greatly reduce performance), all you really need is to:

1. Make sure you have WINE installed correctly
2. Download the windows standalone projector debugger
3. Write a wrapper script that calls wine on the windows .exe, this wrapper will then be called by flex builder. You can see my sampe script to start (it’s very simple, just need to adjust for your paths/filenames).

In other news, I’m working on my first AS3 application that is above the tech-demo level! Well…so far haven’t gotten much, but I’ve got code that compiles on both Linux Flex Builder 2, as well as Windows FlashDevelop, with no changes (yay!). You can see what I have so far, but not it’s not very exciting yet.

Every time someone mentions open sourcing the flash player, someone always jumps up to defend Adobe (formerly Macromedia…I’ll always think of Flash as a MM product). There are many good reasons why they may not want to opensource the runtime, but the fear of having multiple incompatible runtimes is not one of them.

The ‘OMG incompatible versions’ thing is just a bunch of FUD. If Adobe kept control of the player, there would not be any issue with this. Sure, you might have 1 or 2% of the users branching off to make their own versions, but they already do this anyway! (see gnash, also that other opensource flash player). If the official player were open sourced, then the branches would be much more compatible. Gnash lacks in a lot of areas, and only supports up to F7, imagine if they could reuse code from the official player. So you would actually gain more compatibility by opensourcing, not less!

Notes on Blair’s post:

1. Microsoft’s JVM was not made by branching an open-source copy of Sun’s JVM. It was made by microsoft, and they PURPOSEFULLY made it incompatible, to try and encorage platform lock-in. After the whole suit from Sun, a few years later they made their own language / platform (C# / .NET), and achieved the same goals. (Platform lockin. No, Mono is not a good substitute for 90% of apps)
2. Microsoft’s JVM did not kill Java in the browser, Java sucking is what killed Java in the browser.
3. Sun’s JVM just went GPL recently, and there hasn’t been an explosion of dozens of incompatible JVMs. In fact, off the top of my head, I cannot think of a single JVM besides the official one, because that’s what I always use, on windows, mac, and linux. Sure there are different versions, but the same applies to flash, and to any non-dead technology.

(Personally I do not like the GPL, it has some real problems, but that’s a topic for another day)

For the case of the flash player, imagine that we still had ExpressInstall, and that it always pointed at the official Adobe upgrade site. The only people who might even possibly install an incompatible version, are the fringe users, and they would be fully aware of what they are doing. The average user who just sees ‘New version of flash, click OK’ would always have the official version.

I wish people would stop resorting to this argument against flash being open source. Why not just use the real ones?

1. Adobe makes lots of money selling flash player to device manufacturers.
2. Adobe uses expensive proprietary audio and video codes which they cannot open source.
3. Probably a few others as well, but the above two are the main ones in my mind.