After seeing the Romo smartphone robot on Kickstarter some time ago, I was hooked. I wanted one. And I wanted to program for it myself, on my Windows Phone! So I pledged a certain amount of money for the limited edition one - gotta have the T-shirt too - and waited for the Kickstarter results...
And then it was a landslide (they raised $114796!), and around Christmas I received my robot. It happened to be limited edition number 42 and all, pleasing my inner nerd immensely. To get to work!
In fact, I had contacted the guys at Romotive to ask about the sounds needed to drive the robot. The evening before FedEx would deliver, I had a first draft of a library and an app with some simple buttons. When the Romo arrived, this code immediately drove the Romo robot flawlessly, without any changes needed. That certainly was cool.
Today after the last day at work, I met up with some of the WP7NL crew. This first demo received some great reactions and some good suggestions too. Turns out the Romo base reacts to volume as well as sound frequencies. So I reworked the library to allow you to use this to not only control forward/backward motion and left/right rotation but variable speed for both as well.
When the library is done and tested, which means having written and published at least one Romo WP7 app myself, I plan to publish it open source on Codeplex and make the binaries available (nice reason to get into NuGet) as soon as possible. And then, order yourself a Romo, and get programming robots!
Keep watching this space for more info!
