Posts tagged mix
Microsoft Team Builds Windows Phone 7-Controlled T-Shirt Cannon Robots
Mar 19th
Looks like Windows Phone 7 Series is capable of handling more than user interface demos after all. A team at Microsoft was given two weeks to build a pair of Windows Phone-controlled t-shirt-firing cannon robots to be used at the MIX conference on March 15. At somewhere around $10,000, their budget was a bit higher than most of us have to spend on such things, but we have to admit, what they came up with looks pretty cool.
The team mounted an industrial t-shirt cannon on a heavy-duty pan-tilt servo unit, tossed those onto a 100-pound battlebot kit, and added some Phidgets microcontrollers and an onboard HP Envy 13 to run it all. Of course, the robot’s camera doesn’t just stream video over IP, as you might expect– it uses an onboard web server with Microsoft’s IIS Smooth Streaming technology. Then they built a Windows Phone 7 Series app to remotely drive the robots around and shoot out t-shirts.
A Windows Phone 7 Series app remotely controls the robots
The team consulted with two outside designers– normally, you’d imagine this could be a problem given the secrecy around Windows Phone 7 Series at the time, but since WP7S apps use Silverlight, they just told the designers they were making Silverlight desktop apps! The full details, along with more photos and the complete source code for the project, are available at Microsoft’s Coding4Fun site here.
Source: Microsoft Coding4Fun
Update: Video posted after the break.
Sphere: Related Content
Windows Phone 7 Series Minimum Hardware Requirements
Mar 17th
Microsoft revealed the minimum hardware requirements for Windows Phone 7 Series devices at the MIX conference, shown below. Nothing too surprising here- we’re looking at some pretty high-end specs. WP7 does not support external memory cards, so the phones must have 8GB or more built-in flash storage.
The specs list “ARMv7 Cortex/Scorpion or better” for the processors, referring to ARM Cortex A8 processors (used in the iPhone 3GS and other high-end phones) and Qualcomm’s Scorpion core from its Snapdragon chipsets (found in the HTC HD2, Google Nexus One, and others). We’re told there are more specific performance requirements, though. For more information on mobile processors, see our Smartphone Processor Guide.
Screen
Capacitive touch with 4 or more contact points
WVGA (800×480) or HVGA (480×320) resolution
WVGA (800×480) or HVGA (480×320) resolution
Sensors
A-GPS, Accelerometer, Compass, Light, Proximity
Camera
5 megapixels or more, flash required, camera button required
Multimedia
Common detailed specs, Codec Acceleration
Memory
256 MB RAM or more, 8 GB Flash or more
GPU
DirectX 9 acceleration
CPU
ARMv7 Cortex/Scorpion or better
Sphere: Related Content
MIX: The Windows Phone 7 Series Apps Story
Mar 16th
Microsoft’s presentations earlier today at the MIX developer conference answered a lot of questions about third-party applications on the company’s upcoming Windows Phone 7 Series operating system. We’ve summarized most of the take-away points below. More >
Sphere: Related Content
Recent Comments