This question involves several areas but primarily microcontrollers
(programming and wiring them) and multimedia programmers that are
familiar with Director 8.5 XDK (or equivalent lower level solution).

The project is going to run as a Shockwave movie over internet.  I
want to have some sort of sensors (photoelectric, infrared, etc...)
that are wired to a board/microprocessor and have signals sent to the
PC (and eventually to the Director 8.5 application).

The Director app. would also have a Flash 5 project imbedded into it
so there might be a way to interface flash too.  I assume that this
involves the 8.5 XDK and C programming and would also entertain
OOP(C++) Avenues and different hardware/microprocessor scenarios.
All that I basically want to do is send some sort of binary or ASCII
code equivalent to the Director 8.5 projector.  Accordingly this would
play different frames of the movie.  My team is stumped because we
don't know hardware and final projects are due in 10 weeks.  The team
is 4 guys, some know C (C++) and others know ActionScript/Lingo.

I would entertain any feasible scenarios to solve this. I was elected
to do project research and have no clue where to start.

Thanks in advance!

Carl Johnston

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Clarification of Question by ceejay-ga on 21 Jun 2002 10:26 PDT

Thanks for the input mmastrac!  I'm going to try to clarify...

First off, it's not necessary that this communicate at the binary
level.  I would actually rather not deal with things on that level if
I can avoid it.  This is a final project for a multimedia production
class and the requirements are that we use 3 different languages to
build an application.

There are no specific requirements but are project will really only
work with some form of hardware/software interaction due to the nature
of the project.  This is a teaching aid for elementary students that
requires them to pick up objects from a sensor driven table to
determine their answers.  My team is pretty resourceful on the
software side.  We have Visual Studio and any Macromedia apps and can
get whatever is needed to successfully finish this.

The application will ultimately be running on WinXP with IE (the
typical PC setup).  I like the idea about using ActiveX or some other
plugin within the browser to communicate with the microcontroller. 
That may be the only way to really get it working and bulletproof. 
Client/Server communication isn't a big issue.  We will deploy XML,
hopefully through a socket connection so we can log all client input. 
That would be the 'less challenging' of the problems as most of the
team has server side application experience.  The server would
problably be IIS although it would be less relevant since any
server/client communication would involve a scripting language
(ASP,ColdFusion,etc..).  I think that a local ActiveX application
running inside a browser is possibly heading in the right direction.

The biggest obstacle is for us to establish a link between the
microcontroller and the PC.  I'm almost wondering if some ActiveX
component is the better way to go.  I was initially thinking of the
Director 8.5 XDK just because we figured that it would give us the
level of communication we needed.  Since the microcontroller would be
located at the client machine, I figured that it would be better to
run the ActiveX plugin on the client side.  I'm not sure if we are
going to be able to run any code at the server side due to
restrictions on the server.  We don't have a dedicated server to have
this freedom.  It should still work at the clients box.

I'm going to pick up some electrical books and research that way.  I'm
really still interested in paying out for this question but I need a
workable solution.  I need to figure out a hardware api that is
capable of the serial communication which probably isn't hard.  It's
the actual hardware that is the biggest issue.  I need to have a
board/microcontroller that can handle 8 sensors and manage their(the
sensors) states.

Thanks again!

I don't believe sending the binary data directly to the shockwave app
is the best idea.

I'm going to assume you have access to Visual Studio and will be using
Windows and IE.

First, create an application using Visual Studio that constantly
accesses the serial ports or PCI ports to and shows a live status
update (just use textboxes and things like that).  Once you have that
up and running, have it dump the status to a text or XML file on the
server in the web directory every second or so.  This file can then be
downloaded by client-side flash, parsed and displayed.

If your requirement is interaction, however, you'll need to create a
server-side web page that can take input from the client.  You can use
a variety of methods under Windows for the webpage to communicate with
the client.  One method is by using a COM component embedded in the
server-side webpage that handles the webserver <-> microcontroller app
interaction by sending Windows messages (the easiest method).

Can you give more details about:

- what your requirements are
- how you communicate with the microprocessor
- what your client-side browsers are
- what your server-side system is

I'd go along with this, but have a look at ActiveWire's site. They've
got a board with multiple inputs/outputs that you can connect to your
computer via USB and you can access it easily through Visual Basic or
Visual C/C++.

The cost is low too - $65 for a board with USB Cable. See
http://www.activewireinc.com/

I can do that...with Macromedia's MX series this is not something that
is completely out of the question and you could use flash as well as
shockwave.  An interesting project to be sure, for what application
are you going to use this technology?

Thanks!