With a little creativity and a dash of HID you can package Flash, Flex, and AIR applications with some sweet hardware goodness.

Six months ago I ran into a feature request in the Adobe bug-base asking for USB API support to be added to Flash Player. Which is pure crazyness... or is it? I too would love to be able to play Flash games with a regular game controller or use a GPS in Flex or AIR without having to jump through serial-proxy hoops. Being able to easily cross that hardware boundary would open a new chapter in the "Flash Chronicles" for developers and end-users...

The reality? It's probably safe to say, from a purists point of view, adding generalized native, virtual, or magical USB support to the Flash Player just isn't going to happen any time soon. The Flash runtime is small, sweet, and it's pretty evident that Adobe wants it to stay that way.

Size might be agreeable / manageable with a bare-bones approach you say? I might be... but a generic approach isn't going to yield favorable results. What I am trying to say is that it is highly unlikely that you would have all the specific stuffs that you would need to connect to and communicate with a given device using a generic interface or API. The lowest common denominator is HID and even many of those devices don't use the default OS HID driver. Which brings us to another enormous obstacle... drivers.

Your OS is going to need a driver to initialize the device and after it does we will still need a framework / driver in ActionScript to make things happen. I'll stop there...

I think that the underlying reason behind the bug-base issue is sound; to provide developers with a reasonable means to traverse hardware boundaries allowing them to enhance and expand the end-user experience with peripherals. Is this possible? Yes. With a little creativity and a dash of HID you can package Flash, Flex, and AIR applications with hardware support.

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I've proposed a session for Adobe MAX 2009 - where I would love to share my goodie-bag: a series of Flash friendly (plug-n-play) hardware solutions and a one-click replacement for serial proxy setups. Demonstrations will include driving hardware including (but not limited to) infrared, RFID, magstripe readers, GPS, game controllers, an RC racecar with *cough* telemetry, and a DraganFlyer X-6 from interfaces built in Flash, Flex, and AIR.

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For those who can't wait... I'll be blogging / posting portions of the presentation between now and October. To start the ball rolling - some of the magic happens because of this little guy from Radovan Robotics.

Here's a teaser for my next post... Flash does support USB... USB HID that is (keyboard/mouse).

"How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?"

Mr. Spock Arthur Conan Doyle