Netduino - .NET Micro Framework Arduino Compatible Board - Blogs

bGatti August 5, 2010 at 7:46am

Yeah - another Board with pins laid out by some drunk monkey (.1 spacing - or not?)
Another board with a rest button and status leds hid by the inevitable "shields".
Another board with the power pins so far removed from say the communication pins, that any connection is forced to encompass the entire board space.

(So this is a great board - .Net is beyond great - for $34? that's a wet dream (Sparkfun has this for $79) but really, I have nothing but disdain for the location of the Arduino pins - they aren't regular, they don't line up one side to the other, they are much wider than necessary, and did I mention they don't line up?) So it irks me when I see Yet another board whose only claim to fame is that it has copied what is arguably the worse design flaw of the Arduino Board.

Michael Zaffuto August 5, 2010 at 5:52am

The board support package and libraries are all open source, I believe the first and only .net micro framework port to be so, you can buy a raw chip from your favorite vendor and duplicate this thing unlike FEZ which is a black box. It is a more powerful chip than a 1280, but .net does have a lot of overhead, it is hard for me to say at the moment what the comparitive throughput will be. At the moment, my thoughts are that it wouldn't be the best to use as the main processor on autopilot board. I'm going to evaluate it to understand what it is good at to determine what type of applications it is most suited for. The cortex M3 using leaf maples xduino is most certainly a higher performer, faster clock speeds, less overhead. Netduino will be revealing a growth path shortly for other hardware that exposes almost all of the io pins.

.NET micro framework greatest attribute is using Microsofts Visual Studio IDE, a no compromise obviously fully featured environment. I have not developed with one of these yet, but I'm sure many of you have at least dabbled in creating some simple programs in visual basic at one point or another. The IDE lets you insert breakpoints, inspect variable values etc..troubleshooting code is a breeze without using serial output streams.

High level programmers I work with talk to me at times about projects they want to make for applications around their house, I usually mention arduino to them. But they are aware of other .net microframework boards, but they have usually been much more expensive. At 34.95, this type of programmer, can develop code for netduino in exactly the same ide as they use during the day at work, it is comforting and familiar, I think the price and platform concept has lowered the barrier for another class of potential microcontroller users.

Overwatch August 5, 2010 at 4:50am

Sounds like another black box.

passunca August 5, 2010 at 2:47am

how is this cpu compared to the 1280, is it more powerful?

Developer

Michael Smith August 5, 2010 at 1:33am

And why arm7 when you can get a Cortex M3 cf. Leaf Maple/xduino?

Developer

Jason Short August 4, 2010 at 10:47pm

I don't get the form factor. Where are all those CPU pins going? It seems to have the same IO as a 328 but the size of a 1280.

Knuckles904 August 4, 2010 at 10:25pm

I also saw this. It seems like a great piece of kit to check out. Watched the intro videos and having dabbled in c# it looks like it could be really easy to pick up. Im very glad to see a powerful board like this at a "reasonable" price

AVS August 4, 2010 at 10:13pm

Best of luck, I also like the .net framework. It isn't very well supported by microsoft as yet but it is neat and 4.01 looks great. I think you will only have 120k of program space to play with and i am not sure how well the multi-tasking will handle things in flight. Very interested to hear how you get on

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