And I´m talking about your Phone´s vibrator. What you were thinking of? ;)
I usually play around with Windows Mobile development through the Compact Framework. In my spare time, I´m working in a new project which requires to control the phone´s vibrator. As I had to look for a while to find a solution, I´m posting here what I found.
- Download the latest free version of the amazing OPENNETCF from here.
- If you are using a Smart Phone, use the Vibrate class found at the OpenNETCF.WindowsCE.Forms namespace. It works just as a Play/Stop static class, so nothing else needed to be explained.
- If you are using a Pocket PC, you will have to do it in a different way:
For Pocket PCs, the vibration feature is implemented as a notification LED. You can get access to the vibrator or any other LED of your device with the LED class found at the OpenNETCF.WindowsCE.Forms namespace. The drawback is that you will have to find yourself which LED is actually mapped to the vibrator, as it seems there is no way to find that programmatically. The process to use the vibrator is simple:
3.1.- Create the class that will give you acces to the LEDs:
OpenNETCF.WindowsCE.Forms.Led leds = new OpenNETCF.WindowsCE.Forms.Led();
3.2.- The Count property of object “leds” will tell you how many leds your device has, but nothing else. You can test with all of them until you find the vibrator.
3.3.- Once you have the LED index mapped to your vibrator (assuming it´s at index 1), you can activate or deactivate the vibrator using:
leds.SetLedStatus(1, OpenNETCF.WindowsCE.Forms.Led.LedState.On / Off);
AFAIK, each device may have it´s vibrator mapped to a different LED index. Here is the list of LED indices I know:
- HTC Touch / Elf / Himalaya (and probably most HTCs) … 1
- Samsung i-900 / Omnia … 11
TODO
I don´t even know if this is possible (may be there´s no such hardware functionality), but it would be cool to control vibration intensity, so more complex feedback patterns could be output to the user. Anyone knows about this?