Back in 2007 I saw a talk by Craig Swann at Flash on the Beach about using an array of different house hold electrical objects (switches, keys and even wind chimes) to interact with Flash through an I-PAC USB keyboard encoder. I remember at the time thinking, woah, that looks complicated. However I recently bought myself an I-PAC and to my pleasant surprise it’s incredibly easy. It also gives me an excuse to go around hardware shops and buy all sorts of crap to hook up to my Flash Applications.
About two weeks ago I bought a Swana JLF-H5 Arcade Joystick from Hong Kong for £15 (Cheap!) on eBay, like the ones we used to use at the arcade back in the day.
I thought this would be lots of fun to mess around with in Flash. I don’t have a project as such but for now just hooking the stuff up is pretty exciting. As soon as I know I can work with it, I can start thinking of things to use it for. To my surprise it came with the JLF-H 5-Pin Cable so I didn’t need to buy any more kit to get it hooked up. I just plugged one end into the joystick…
…and the other end into the I-PAC and boom, all hooked up.
Then I wrote a quick keyboard event test to make sure they were firing the correct keys in the correct directions and now I have a classic arcade joystick as a tool when developing my next application. Sweet…
Bone Yard 
Just ran into this. SUPER belatedly – but put a smile on my face knowing someone gave it a whirl. cheers!
Thanks for the reply Craig. Seems like such a long time ago now, 2007! Your talk was one of those “penny dropping” moments for sure at Flash on the Beach. Yourself and Marcos Weskamp are perhaps the main reason why I went on to create so many interesting little projects (none of them get finished!). What are you playing around with at the moment, still doing talks?
and more so belatedly! looplabs.com. my first love and passion