The Ball is in our court and control with the Sphero C# Controller (WP8, MonoDroid, MonoTouch and more)

I'm not sure if this is a awesome Hardware Friday most, a Mobile Monday post, a Modern Monday post or a Wild Wednesday post. Well, actually I think it's all four!

BallControl - an open source Sphero C# controller - WP7, MonoDroid and hopefully MonoTouch (and WinRT?)

Meet my latest open source project - meet BallControl for Sphero:

Here's a first video I made for the project - sorry about the low audio volume!

Xamarin the Native, Sphero the Ball and Lumia the Phone....

After a long week of coding, this experiment in sleep deprivation reaches its inevitable conclusion....

Featuring:
- Xamarin.Mobile Picture capture
- Native voice control
- Native accelerometer control
- Native UI with lots of touch
- Native BlueTooth
- Guest Starring Sphero the ball
- Cross platform Mvvm

Xamarin the Monkey....  because going Native matters

 

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Some technical info

The project demonstrates Xamarin.Mobile by using Xamarin.Mobile media picker.... But, beyond that it also extends Xamarin.Mobile tackling some elements of several Xamarin.Mobile requests on uservoice:

• File/Directory browser API.
• Cross Platform Project File Solution
• Multiplatform MVVM Framework
• Bluetooth API
• Posting things (links, txt, pics,..) on Facebook
• Accelerometer
• Make Xamarin Mobile API open source

The Source

The source is on: https://github.com/slodge/BallControl
Currently, we have:

• a working WP8 app
• a working (but ugly) MonoDroid app
• a non-working Windows Store app - it seems that Windows Store does not yet support BlueTooth SPP devices - which is so bad

I will get a MonoTouch app working soon....
I will also post to the WP8 app store soon.
And I will post some more videos soon....

If anyone is interested in how the app was built I did live blog the first 10 hours of coding... see PDF at http://sdrv.ms/V8xdmV (or email ...

Ball Control

A BlueTooth/Accelerometer/Camera/VoiceControl app for fun and for Developer Competition

Ball Control is an open source Sphero controller.

To use Ball Control, you first need a Ball - get your Sphero from http://gosphero.com - and in the UK from http://www.firebox.com/product/5367/Sphero

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WHAT?

Ball Control's first target platform is Windows Phone 8 where it makes use of Portable Class Libraries, Xamarin.Mobile library, and MvvmCross

The app allows you to control your ball - currently you can control:

• heading
• rolling
• colo(u)r
• tail light on/off

Using the WP8 APIs - abstracted inside PCL MvvmCross plugins, you can control these things using:

• touch
• tilt
• voice

The current repo includes a first version of Ball Control for Xaramin Mono for Android. this is in draft at present - it works but is not styled yet. Ball Control will also soon provide WinRT and Xamarin MonoTouch for iOS version

PROJECT DETAILS

The goal of this application was to show off C# Mobile coding, specifically showing off the use of C# native solutions including the use of Xamarin.Mobile products. It was also a chance for me to write some fun code after being on 'business logic' for a few months. This application uses MvvmCross and Portable Class Libraries throughout - there are no #if statements allowed - it's AmazeBalls.

This project includes:

• Xamarin.Mobile
  • Media Picker
    • Really easy way to take a photo - took seconds to add to my app
• MvvmCross
  • Mvvm Platform
    • Plugins via IoC and PCL for code sharing
• Windows Phone 8 SDK
  • Voice Control
  • BlueTooth
  • Accelerometer
• Android SDK with Xamarin's Mono for Android
  • BlueTooth
  • Accelerometer
  • more coming soon....

Other platforms and features will be added soon....

There are some NUnit unit tests included - I ran out of time a bit - so coverage is not huge. More will be added!

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Now how awesome is that!