Controlling a hardware prototype with your Windows Phone

This blog post was authored by Erik Reitan, a programming writer on the Windows Phone developer content team.

- Adam

You’re already familiar with creating great apps for Windows Phone, and porting your apps from iOS or Android, but did you know that you can build .NET hardware prototype devices to integrate with your Windows Phone?

Using a prototyping platform for small electronic devices, such as .NET Gadgeteer or Netduino, you can create interesting hardware projects. Using C#, the .NET Micro Framework‎, and Visual Studio, you can develop your own hardware prototype and use the capabilities of your Windows Phone to interact with the hardware.

The following video shows how Matt @RogueCode used his Windows Phone to control a maze using Bluetooth and Netduino.

For more details about Matt’s project, read Greg Duncan’sCoding4Fun blog post on Channel 9.

Here’s another video that shows how Marco Minerva @MarcoMinerva used his Windows Phone to control a rover with Bluetooth and.NET Gadgeteer. Very cool!

For complete details about Marco’s project, see the related Coding4Fun blog post on Channel 9.

Here’s another video by Matt that shows how you can combined Windows Phone, Netduino, a sonar sensor, and Bluetooth for some interesting results.

For more details about Matt’s project, see the following Coding4Fun blog post on Channel 9.

Each of these Windows Phone projects provide the steps, code, and details necessary to build the project yourself, through the above links. Possibly, these examples could lead to your own hardware prototype. Let us know what you create.