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Time for the third episode of “Out of Boredom” series :) There was a Sonar project and something about shooting paintballs… This time you will learn how to use Arduino and .NET 4.5 to receive input from joystick and use it to control servos that move a webcam horizontally and vertically!

My first Arduino based project was Sonar with C#, JS and HTML5. Now I continue the “Out of Boredom” series with a setup that allows firing a paintball marker (gun) with a command sent from a computer :) This time software stack is simpler - just a small Arduino sketch and uncomplicated WinForms (.NET/C#) application, but hardware requires a bit of electronics knowledge. Don’t worry though, nothing too complicated - I’m definitely not an expert in this field…

Part 1 described the general idea behind Sonar project, hardware components used and Arduino sketch… This second post in “Out of Boredom” series is about C# and JavaScript programs that make it possible to display ultrasonic range sensor data in web browsers. The role of .NET application is to receive messages from Arduino over serial port and broadcast it to clients using SignalR library. JS/HTML5 clients use jquery.signalR lib to obtain information about servo position with distance to obstacles and use this data to render sonar image on canvas:

This post marks the beginning of “Out of Boredom” series. It will be about creating stuff with my recently purchased Arduino Uno. Let’s have a break from chores of professional programming and create something just for fun :)

Read the first part of the article if you haven’t done so already. Part 1 has a brief overview of what GC is and how it performs its magic. It contains a test of GC performance with regards to large array of bytes. You can also find there a detailed information about my test environment…

.NET GC is very fast! Well… I hope you need more than this reassuring statement, if so, read on :) I will show you some test results to prove that I’m not lying but first I will give you a quick reminder about what GC is:

Imagine that you want to create edit view for Company entity which has two properties: Name (type string) and Boss (type Person). You want both properties to be editable. For _Company._Name simple text input is enough but for Company.Boss you want to use jQuery UI Autocomplete widget*. This widget has to meet following requirements: