Programming Flash with haXe for the Chumby (Saturday, March 14, 2009)

For Christmas, I received a Chumby interactive media player. It is basically a cuddly Linux computer, the size of an alarm clock, that serves widgets to its touch screen. With my interest in home automation, I think the Chumby device would make a terrific platform for controlling a home automation system. Widgets for the Chumby are written using Flash, and unlike most of the use of Flash on the Web, it makes a great deal of sense for a device like the Chumby.

So, after a bit of research, and deciding firmly that I did not want to use any proprietary software products from Adobe or painful graphical IDEs, I found haXe, a novel programming language that can be compiled for a number of platforms — including Flash. I've spent the last couple of days learning haXe, and all the painful Flash APIs, and for my first program, I have developed a widget that I can use with the Chumby to control my house. I call it ScraXml. Click on the little question mark in the widget to read all about it.

Comments

YES - I was thinking of just this kind of application for both the Chumby and the Motorola Droid. But I have not had time to look into development for either platform.

Have you made your Flash / haXe code or binary public? I already have a server that I could adjust to provide the XML if I had your code to run on the Chumby I would be 50% there!

JMC - Unfortunately, I haven't had much time to work on this project. Apparently, there is some trouble getting Flash compiled from haXe to run on the Chumby. I'm going to try to get back to it over the summer. One thing to note about your phone: I have an HTC Hero and even when you're running on a LAN, it uses your provider's DNS, so it can't resolve host names on your internal network. I don't know if they've fixed that for Android 2.x. BUT... your Droid has a web interface - I wouldn't have bothered with a Flash implementation if the Chumby had a useful browser.