Microsoft Robotics Studio - Very KEWL!

This weekend I'm working at the "beach-house" (well our 28ft travel trailer parked at a campground right one the Gulf at Fort Myers Beach).  Since I've got most of my work deliverables caught up (I hate saying that since I know I'll jinx myself), this weekend I wanted to play a little.  From about 1991 to 1995 my job was to design hardware then write the software that ran on it to make the lights come up in the right order (well maybe make it do a little more than that).  I really loved this but since about 1995, I've been focused mainly on business applications...really a different world.  About once a year I try to spend a few days doing something hardware related so those brain cells don't totally die off.  A few years ago it was hacking an X-Box, then the last couple years it was working on W3, my home-brew robot based upon the BasicStamp chip that contained Sonar, Compass, X-10 Camera and an interface via WiFi on an old iPaq, this was a lot of fun but most of the effort here was actually constructing the hardware and writing the device interfaces.

That brings me to this years effort and MDEC (incredibly good conference) earlier this year I was introduced to the MS Microframework, they had a "Sumobot" competition, unfortunately at the time I was doing the conference in the day and "work-stuff" at night so I didn't get involved.  After browsing the MSDN site last week, I came across the Microsoft Robotics Studio, then saw that it supported the new Lego NXT robotics system...I had to have one of these.  It arrived on my doorstep Thursday and I was set for my weekend in Fort Myers Beach.  I spent Saturday "playing" with lego's and built up the robot you can see between my two monitors.

Next was to get it talking to the computer, this was actually pretty easy since the NXT has built in Bluetooth and the communications "stuff" happened in the plumbing of the MS Robotics Studio.  My prior solution was to hookup an RS232 serial port between my BasicStamp chip to the inputs on an iPAQ, then I used the WiFi card in the sleeve to do some lo-level socket stuff to talk to the desktop app.  This is much cleaner!

So now all the pieces are in place, I've got the robot setup, I've got communications up and running, now it's time to make it do something!  We have three little terriers in our trailer that don't like being left alone.  My goal is to hookup the sound detector on the robot to fire off an SMS message to my cell phone when the dogs start barking (so we don't get kicked out of anymore RV parks).  Then I want to allow some sort of PocketIE interface to manipulate the robot to take "correct actions", I think I should be able to hookup my software to my MCE that is in the trailer, then with some Text-to-Speech stuff, issue the "No-Bark" command to the pups and see how that works.  There is also a small wireless web cam I plan to get for this...I think that would be extremely interesting

-ec