Phidgets SWC Now Available
I don’t know why exactly, but it has bugged me for some time that the Phidgets code doesn’t ship with a SWC file. To be sure, it’s of great credit to their openness that they ship with the full source, but I end up with copies of that source lying all over my system. Before long all those copies end up eating a good amount of space. I remedied this problem today by building a SWC around their source. You can download that SWC here for Phidgets 21. And of course I couldn’t help but build a new demonstration as well, which is included.
The demo uses the Phidgets Interface Kit 8/8/8 and a photo cell. Rather than just respond to raw dumps of data coming in from the sensor, I decided I’d setup a timer and incrementally ask the sensor for the value. The timer only sleeps for a half of a second, but while it’s sleeping, I animate a bar from the previous value to the latest value. The result is a little light sensor bar chart (gauge?). The look and feel for the user interface comes from the PlotKit JavaScript chart library, which I’ve been using in other projects recently.