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[energywave]

Hi Chris, sorry if I reply late but I'm working hard these days...

I'm the programmer here so I've asked to our electronic experts if they have thoughts. Here what would be useful for us (that are our thoughts, I completely understand that it's likely you have a different vision...) :

• RTC chip / lithium battery arrangement with base / PCB wirings so that the cost of the Netduino remains nearly the same but who wants can put in the chip and the battery and they have a board with RTC without the effort / cost to add a shield using i2c
• The same as above for a watchdog chip (like this ) or the implementation of the internal watchdog so that if the program completely hangs we can automatically reset the board. This is particularly of my interest, I'm very worried to leave the boards in the wild without a reliable auto reset (I've implemented a software watchdog but we can't count so much on it...)
• A way of using some bytes of flash (referred as "simple storage" elsewhere in this forum) so that we can permanently store a configuration. Something like 32 byte are ok for my needs but maybe if we can configure how much to use...
• The possibility to communicate using serial over USB without drivers as the Arduino can do (keyboard emulation would also be of interest...). This would be FANTASTIC for us. We are actually attaching one N2 to every panel PC via RS232 to handle I/O like electrolock, buttons, door sensors but even industrial equipments. We are buying RS232 interface from 3.3V and using a panel pc  usb to power N2 and an RS232 to communicate. If we could communicate through USB we could completely remove RS232, choosing a cheaper Panel PC (without serial ports) and no more need to have an RS232 interface.

About the frying of the boards... well, Chris you can't protect 3.3V, no need for that. We have to deal with an electronic board, it's our responsability to take care of it.   If we fry... our fault.

 

What do you think about those suggestions?

[Chris Walker]

Hi energywave:

On USB Serial...we will have a USB Serial module (GoBus) for Netduino a bit later this year. If we also built a basic Netduino with 3 GoBus ports, would that take care of this well for you? [We're also looking at ways to allow sidechannel USB profiles through the main USB interface...but there are some side effects there we would need to address.]

On watchdog and basic EEPROM-like storage...on the short list for feature requests. No timeline for official support, but your voice has been added. [It's also possible for the community to add this as a feature in a custom firmware release.]

On RTC and battery...there are some size and pin limitations around this. We are looking at an affordable add-on GoBus module option with a coin cell holder (that would automatically sync time). There may be other ways to address this in the future as well.

On all of the above: we're listening, and we're actively building new hardware and adding new features to take good care of you guys. Please keep letting us know what you want/need and we can either point you in a good direction to accomplish your goal, build out new functionality, add to the feature request list, etc.

Thanks energywave!

Chris