Flexpert to the rescue

Some time ago I was watching an episode of “Prototype This” and was thinking that these guys have an awesome job of creating mechanical prototypes and interfacing them with some fancy programming. That got me thinking about some things that seemed quite interesting to me and I started surfing the web for some affordable hardware.

I then came across Phidgets motor controllers and I was immediately interested in it, mainly because it has an Flash/Flex Actionscript library that allows your Flash or Flex application to communicate with that controller. So I ordered one and started working on an application. What I came up with is a wooden maze that is placed on 4 servo motors and I can now control the maze by using a socket connection on mu Android phone running Android 2.1 (Eclair). I needed a special construction to get the rotational movement converted into a vertical movement to lift and tilt the maze and it kind of worked. I would have preferred to use linear motors instead, but they were just way too expensive for me. This did the trick as well. It was just a little harder to get the setup right. Just watch the video and keep in mind that this is merely a prototype.

If you want to investigate this source code even further, you can download the source file here.