So now I’m sitting in my hotel room, waiting to leave for the airport in half an hour. It gets me thinking about the past couple of days and the Flash Israel event.

First of all, for everyone who has been thinking about bringing Phidgets or Arduino on a plane: don’t do it. I mean, I did eventually make it to Israel in one piece (I’m not yet sure I’ll be getting back safely as well), but the security nowadays is so tight I actually needed a couple of hours to get past the security check. Even getting into the mall where the event was held turned out to be quite the challenge. Imagine a stranger walking up to security and then saying he’s carrying some batteries with some wires attached to that, which powers some electronic components… Right, that does sound suspicious, doesn’t it? But in the end they finally understood that it was actually quite harmless.

With that said, let’s turn the attention to the event. It has been a very good 2 days for me, meeting a lot of interesting people and kick-ass developers here in Tel Aviv. These guys do amazing stuff. I even learned that lots of things have been invented here in Israel, such as the flash drive and the firewall. Didn’t have a clue…
I also met a couple of guys who were already into Arduino programming and have gotten some insight to some great applications for that technology. I may find some inspiration there for my next Phidgets project.

The speakers at the event were top-notch as well. You had the ones we all know: Lee Brimelow, Kevin Schmidt, Ben Forta and Grant Skinner and their presentations rocked, as usual. But then you had a couple of unfamiliar faces (at least to me) and they definitely surprised me with their sessions. Apart from the fact their were a couple of presos in Hebrew, which I don’t understand at all, there was large variety of interesting topics, ranging from game development to LiveCycle Data Services.

Since it was my first time at this event and even my first time in Israel, I didn’t quite know what to expect. But the crowd here was very interactive and I loved being here. So, that means I say a big thank you to Almog Koren for inviting me over here and I certainly hope to be back next year.

A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to be invited to present at Flash Israel on February 22-23. There were a lot of topics I could choose from, but looking at the list of speakers that were already selected, such as Ben Forta, Lee Brimelow, Grant Skinner, … I knew I had to come up with something mind blowing.

So, after doing some soul searching I reached back to my experience with Phidgets and Arduino. Over the past year I’ve been experimenting with both and found out I love playing around with electronics. Now the great thing about these two brands is that their components can be accessed through Flash technology.

This is exactly what I’ll be talking about, showing some actual real-world applications as well; even using the mobile phone to control these devices. I can’t tell you exactly what I’ll be doing because that would ruin the scoop of my main demo. But I can tell you there’s a laser involved! So if you happen to be in the neighborhood of Tel Aviv, Israel next week, be sure to come over and enjoy all the awesome speakers.

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.