<Jeremy>

Hey everyone Does anyone have any advice or recommendations on how to get started with some PCB manufacture at home? I'm looking for kit that's pretty small scale, the sort of thing you can do in an apartment on a table. If any of you can recommend a good and reasonably priced product, I'd really appreciate it! Thanks in advance, Jeremy

Hey everyone I just bought a HMC588CL magnetometer, and after a bit of googling I haven't found any records of existing Netduino code for getting started with it. So since I've got mine working, I've attached my code. Let me know if there's any bugs in my code, but hopefully not - you'll see that it's very simple code - the application doesn't really do anything except output the X and Y readings, but it gets you started with the device. You can use these readings to calculate your bearing from North. I hope someone out there in the community finds a use for it in a project! Cheers, Jeremy

Hi everybody I've got a question about Serial port communication using the netduino. This is the first time I've built something like this - my first week with a Netduino - but I hope this isn't a dumb question!!!. Where I've got to so far: I'm using a barebone FTDI USB to Serial mini adapter - I open COM1 at 115200, and repeatedly send a byte array (each packet being 16 bytes long) from my netduino. I also have a C# client application which reads from the com port at 115200, and successfully sees the stream of bytes that I'm sending from the netduino. So far so good. Where I'm hitting the problem: The client application isn't able to determine where my packets of 16 bytes start and end. I mean if I tell the my client app to read 16 bytes from the port, I find that it's possible it'll pick up the last 7 bytes of one packet and then the first 9 bytes of the second. I think this is probably expected behaviour. My current workaround is a bit of code that looks for a certain byte pattern in what comes in from COM1 - when it finds that, then read the next 16 bytes of data and assume it's a valid packet of my data - and I just repeat that. But do you guys know if there's a more elegant or robust solution to my problem, or if there's a protocol I should look into using to tokenise my data stream? Thanks in advance for any help! Jeremy