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Long live the Netduino


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#1 Paul Newton

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Posted 28 August 2013 - 06:43 PM

I have started this post a few times now, but it kept ending up as a rant, hopefully this one is balanced.

 

Having owned a Netduino plus (v1) for a while now, I'm probably a little biased, but I think its a great platform to enjoy building with.

 

You write your code on the free tools, download it and run it. If you want, you can write it all yourself (my preference) or pull in libraries etc. from the community.

 

One thing I have noticed is the lack of second hand Netduino's for sale on Ebay (at least in the UK), I was really lucky to pickup a pair of plus 1's just after the plus v2 came out - since then I have never seen another one for sale. I think that means people hang on to them. (Maybe its different in your country......)

 

Ok, there are some issues; I was forced to upgrade the firmware to fix the ethernet bugs, but it was fairly straight forward. I have found that when things do go wrong, or when you need to tackle something new, we are all using the "same" system - this means that help from this forum (and others) actually helps.

 

In contrast, I have recently acquired a Raspberry Pi (surprise present). I'm sure you will remember the Pi being launched and it sounded like a Netduino killer - all that RAM, speed and peripherals. Why would anybody ever buy anything else again?

 

I decided to attach it to my Netduino powered buggy. The idea being that I can connect the two via wired Ethernet (which does not use any extra GPIOs), and have the Pi present an interface to the world over Wifi.

 

Sounds simple, but the Raspberry Pi is really complicated to setup and use. While I am writing this, I am waiting for the Pi to update hundreds of bits of software I've never heard of - its taking ages. I'm only doing that because the instructions I found to install a web server failed. I can't tell if the instructions were bad, if my Pi is not setup correctly, if its not compatible with the instructions, or anything else. (Several others who followed the same instructions chose to respond to the article with a volley of four letter words because they managed to kill or lock up their Pi - I have never seen anything like that on the Netduino Forums.)

 

There are just too many varients of OS that the Pi can run, and too many possible packages to chose to run on it, some may or may not run on some OSs, etc. So when you ask or look for help, it seems to me to be very unlikely you will find a solution that works for you.

Even the really simple things are really hard to sort out, like how do I get my code to execute without logging in, or like the Wifi turning off when a live ethernet cable is connected to the Pi - that took many hours of trying different hacks to fix!

Oh, and you can't just turn it off, you need to run a command to turn it off and then pull the power.

I'm starting to rant now!

 

So all I wanted to say is well done to secret labs for bringing us the Netduino.

I hope there are many more developments in the future.

 

Paul



#2 Paul Newton

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Posted 28 August 2013 - 06:52 PM

Needless to say, the upgrade failed and now my Pi is no more.

At least its just a case of re-loading the SD card....



#3 hanzibal

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Posted 28 August 2013 - 07:07 PM

Couldn't agree more! It's a bit like the old Amiga, it worked amazingly well and that was long before the internet or even BBSs in many cases. People were exchanging knowledge through magazines and sending floppy disks by snail mail :-) Same thing, we all had the exact same hardware (almost anyway, there were a few expansion boards). Personally, I instinctively refrained from purchasing a Pi, it was simply too powerful to seem fun and enough challenging for me. I wouldn't be at all surprised if every other Pi ever sold still hides somewhere untouched and in its original packaging. I love the Netduino, it managed to bring my dormant interest for digital electronics back over night! Another thing is the friendly tone and welcoming feel in the forum, personally, I think that is a major contributor to the success.

#4 Nevyn

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Posted 28 August 2013 - 08:15 PM

I have mixed feelings for both the Pi and the Netduino family.

 

The Netduino products are a great range of products and have a fantastic tool chain which is simple and easy to use.  The Plus was the first board I used following a 20+ years break from any electronics.  To be honest it was the link with .NET which sparked my interest.  The rest is history.  The products are great and so is the tool chain.  They are also well put together and robust.  I've been using these for nearly three years now and the worst I have done is stop the LEDs lighting up on a couple of GO! ports.  Not too bad considering I have 9 boards and have used the relatively heavily.  The community is friendly although getting to be a bit silent of late.  12 months ago chat was a vibrant and busy place to be, these days there never seems to be anyone around.

 

The Pi has the advantage of speed but does not have the easy to use tools.  You really have to be into Unix to love it.  For me I don't mind this as I spent three years babysitting a Unix system in the early 1990's.  All right, I'm having to relearn a lot of stuff but I'm going to be doing that anyway as I've become the proud father of my first Mac.  I agree that a lot of these will end up either on eBay or getting dusty in a cupboard somewhere and for no other reason than they are difficult to use in a hardware context.  I found the WiFi infuriating to set up and only really managed that last Friday although I did not put a lot of effort into it for a long time.

 

I think the Pi and the Netduino have two totally different audiences.  The Netduino is really a hardware focused platform.  You are never going to edit a text file with it.  The Pi (primarily) is a platform to teach computing and how computers work.  It can do that because of the variety of tools installed covering ages from 4 upwards.

 

Personally, I'm running a headless Pi over WiFi, a Netduino Plus 2, the occasional Mini, a STM8S Discovery Board and finally, a STM32F4 Discovery board.  I still use the Plus 2 and the Mini as a primary prototyping environment because of the speed at which you can put things together with NETMF and the Netduino.  It will be sad if the environment dies because of the Pi.

 

Regards,

Mark


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Blogging about Netduino, .NET, STM8S and STM32 and generally waffling on about life

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#5 hanzibal

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Posted 29 August 2013 - 08:43 AM

I agree, the Netduino and Pi are not comparable and have different audiences, I was primarily the (in my opinion) somewhat unjustified hype around it.

 

OT: A while ago, I got a Cubieboard and yes, it still sits in unopened box :-) but I mention it because it's comparably priced, has superior hardware over Pi and intended on h/w hacking/interfacing. Runs Android 4.x, Ubuntu, Kali and Debian:

http://cubieboard.org/

http://ubuntuone.com...2MH4kCv5UdA6RmE



#6 remotewizard

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Posted 29 August 2013 - 12:13 PM

Actually, I like my Raspberry Pi in its role as an Internet radio streamer (running nothing more exotic than mpd) controlled by a Netduino (as part of my multimode radio project).  Different tools for different jobs, and all that.

 

But I really like coding in Visual Studio on a Windows machine.  I guess I'm not all that hip. :)



#7 Steve French

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Posted 29 August 2013 - 01:51 PM

I've gotten mono to work pretty well on my raspberry pi, using VC and C# - in fact I've got a website that turns an LED on and off.  Getting Mono working was a giant pain though.... 



#8 Nevyn

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Posted 29 August 2013 - 08:41 PM

I've gotten mono to work pretty well on my raspberry pi, using VC and C# - in fact I've got a website that turns an LED on and off.  Getting Mono working was a giant pain though.... 

Did you manager to get the "Windows" application development stuff working?  I found the console stuff easy to install and work with and was up and running with a serial port app in a few hours but the Windows applications are problematic.

 

Regards,

Mark


To be or not to be = 0xFF

 

Blogging about Netduino, .NET, STM8S and STM32 and generally waffling on about life

Follow @nevynuk on Twitter


#9 Paul Newton

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Posted 09 December 2013 - 07:13 AM

Unusually, there have been three Netduinos on ebay UK this week.

Two are currently on sale a plus and a normal (both look like v1s).



#10 stotech

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Posted 09 December 2013 - 10:43 AM

Shame about the lack of action on the forums of late. Maybe it's bound to happen on this type of forum, now there is such a good history of questions that have already be answered. Netduino has been what I've learnt on and plan to stay on. If I'm missing something it's that I struggle with precise timing sometimes. Given that I can't block the garbage collector out at times. So if I have to look outside the family it will be to the more simple side. Definitely not going with anymore overhead than .net. I too, pray that it survives for years to come. 

 

Here! Here! Long live the king!



#11 Chris Walker

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Posted 09 December 2013 - 10:46 AM

Grant -- maybe if we disabled the search feature...we'd get to answer more questions :) We've sold a lot of Netduinos this year and gained thousands of new community members. Next year is going to be even busier...stay tuned! Chris

#12 stotech

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Posted 09 December 2013 - 10:53 AM

What are you still doing out of bed man! Do you ever sleep! You are a huge credit to the secret labs team and such a important player on these forums.

 

Thanks for a great year. I'm really looking forward to the next.



#13 JoopC

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Posted 09 December 2013 - 02:53 PM

Chris, next generation Netduino, please more memory.....



#14 dotnetworker

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Posted 11 December 2013 - 07:48 PM

I'm getting our family a Pi for Christmas, but next years MakerFaire will defo be a Netduino powered one again.

 

The Netduino acted as an easy & very cheap bridge to electronics from the .NET developer day job (That's after leaving electronics behind as a hobby many years back).

 

I love the rich, familiar easy IDE and debug tools of Neduino. I have found the relatively constrained environment of the Netduino forces me to be more creative with what I do rather than plumping for a solution that is obvious and simplistic. For what I'm doing at moment that is great, however if I wanted image processing or internet streaming I think I would be reaching for a different tool.. Pi. - see they are just different.

 

I don't post much on here but visit quite often, mainly as most of what I want to know is already answered - a good thing as I don't have to wait for answers. 

 

Reminds me I must go find out how power hungry Pi is compared to the Netduino, I would think I wouldn't get it running on batteries for as long?



#15 Chris Walker

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Posted 11 December 2013 - 09:43 PM

Hey dotnetworker, Thanks for the post and the kind thoughts :) I'm happy that Netduino is working out well for you and your projects.

Reminds me I must go find out how power hungry Pi is compared to the Netduino, I would think I wouldn't get it running on batteries for as long?

Speaking of which...would anyone here like to see advanced power management in future Netduinos (or maybe future Netduino firmware)? We've been doing a ton of work on that for AGENT...and I bet we can open source some of that and pull it over to the Netduino family. Chris

#16 stotech

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Posted 11 December 2013 - 10:30 PM

dotnetworker,

 

I've often thought that I would have to change to or add a second device to achieve a decent gui but I've got a work around now so i can stay in the Netduino family. All the gui stuff i've got to do now i use a multi threaded web server, an NP2 and a basic wireless bridge. It's not a cheap solution by any means but, with a bit of creativity you can feed out clever html and java script to make a gui that will run on any phone or tablet device. I'm sure you've already considered it but i thought i'd drop it in for anyone else reading, who might be thinking the pi is better suited for them.

 

Grant






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