Microsoft Team Builds Windows Phone 7-Controlled T-Shirt Cannon Robots

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.