First of all, congratulations to the Secret Labs team for this very awesome project!
I have recently aquired a netduino+ and need to do some high performance bit banging, so I've deleted the .NETMF from the board, and started using Atmel SAM-BA to upload native code to the board.
Since I haven't found much information about using native code on the netduino, I would like to suggest the creation of a new forum area dedicated to this practice. This would allow other people in the same situation to get up to speed faster.
In the meantime, I'd like to share some of the resources I've found so far:
- Great document by Atmel about getting started with AT91SAM7X MCUs. The part about Parallel IO Controllers is of particular interest if you want to to bit-banging.
- (Windows users) To set up your compiler toolchain / IDE you can follow this excellent tutorial. Just unzip it and open the PDF file inside.
- (Linux users) You can mostly use the above tutorial, but download and use Codesourcery Lite EABI instead of Yagarto.
- Atmel SAM-BA for windows and linux will allow you to upload your code to the netduino board. Each time that you want to upload new code, you must follow the same pin-shorting method that you will see a couple of items down the list
- Atmel AT91SAM7X-EK code samples. These are an awesome way to learn about interfacing with all the peripherals (UARTs, USB, ethernet, etc). Most code samples will work out of the box, but some will need adjustments due to different pin assignments on the netduino. Others might not work at all due to missing hardware. YMMV, but they are still an awesome place to learn from.
- How to remove .NETMF from the netduino
- Here's a small google spreadsheet with the netduino -> MCU pin mappings. I've created it for quick reference while coding.
- If you want to go back to the original netduino firmware, this is how to do it
Hope this list may be of service to anyone starting out the same path as me. I'd be very interested to hear from other people doing the same, especially if there is some other info I may be forgetting or haven't found yet.
Have fun!
Tony
