I can say that from our own personal experience at Picwing that getting into hardware is no easy task. Like many in this thread have commented, it is a very mes

I can say that from our own personal experience at Picwing that getting into hardware is no easy task. Like many in this thread have commented, it is a very messy, expensive, time consuming ordeal. So if you can at all avoid doing it, then you should. If you can find a ready-to-use alternative, or something that might be close to an alternative, then I would suggest going with that. With that said, we got into hardware because we didn't really find anything quite like what we wanted to make for the price that we wanted. So we went ahead and started building something custom for ourselves. That's not to say we really underestimated the time and effort involved in doing so. We spent more time on the hardware than we would have liked...time that we could have spent improving software. Regarding the other questions, our device is designed to run arbitrary flash 10 code (within reasonable constraints), but does not run arbitrary AIR code. We develop and test our software on regular PCs, and then test again on the Picwing. The environments are close enough that we don't need to have an emulator.