tweedie

To know it precisely, I would just test and measure how much amps it pulls.
Because the limitations of a 9V battery in amperes per hour, I normally use lipos or arrays of AA batteries. Adafruit sells nice boxes for those: http://www.adafruit.com/products/248

Yeah that is what I thought. I have not got a mini yet, but it was my plan to get one for this project. I didn't want to waste money on the mini if it is not gonna work as long as I would have liked too. The array of AA batteries are nice, but a think it looks a tad bit big for running/cycling!

With thanks to Stefan in netduino chatroom, he led me to the fact I should include the dll in the project. My mistake was that I used the source code of storagedevice.cs which was somewhere in this forum and I thought was enough to use! Doh! Anyway, looking at the SD module datasheet, it seems to indicate that it takes 60mA to read/write from the sd card! That sounds a lot of power! Is that right? Is there power saving tips that I could do?

I have also got a EM406A but AFAIK there is no green LED. Only one red LED. Blinks when searching, steady when fixed. NMEA works great, and is directly connected to my netduino.

Edited, didn't get it from sparkfun, got it from expansys

Thanks for some pointers Chris Walker, I will check them out when I get home from work. At first glance, I am using the normal netduino - not the plus nor the mini. The sd card would have been formatted as fat16 with normal allocation which had been done on windows OS. Anyway, will check out the rest of your comments. thanks

Your wiring looks right to me but I use "SD1" instead of just "SD" when mounting:

Not seen this SD1 documented anywhere (how did you find this?), but I tried it. no luck unfortunately. Also tried SD_Card. Tried other GPIO pins (Pins.GPIO_PIN_D8)

Just wondering, which firmware do you use?

I'm asking, since only the Netduino Plus has SD support by default. For others, you'll need to use 4.1.1 I believe.

According to MFDeploy, it says 4.1.1.0 b1

HalSystemInfo.halVersion:               4.1.2821.0
HalSystemInfo.halVendorInfo:            Netduino (v4.1.1.0 b1) by Secret Labs LLC
HalSystemInfo.oemCode:                  34
HalSystemInfo.modelCode:                177
HalSystemInfo.skuCode:                  4096
HalSystemInfo.moduleSerialNumber:       00000000000000000000000000000000
HalSystemInfo.systemSerialNumber:       0000000000000000
ClrInfo.clrVersion:                     4.1.2821.0
ClrInfo.clrVendorInfo:                  Netduino (v4.1.1.0 b1) by Secret Labs LLC
ClrInfo.targetFrameworkVersion:         4.1.2821.0
SolutionReleaseInfo.solutionVersion:    4.1.1.0
SolutionReleaseInfo.solutionVendorInfo: Netduino (v4.1.1.0 b1) by Secret Labs LLC
SoftwareVersion.BuildDate:              Mar 26 2011
SoftwareVersion.CompilerVersion:        400902

I am using the StorageDevice class that was found here 2nd post. Is that the latest?

I have included SecretLabs.NETMF.Hardware and SecretLabs.NETMF.Hardware.Netduino reference (within C:\Program Files (x86)\Secret Labs\Netduino SDK\Assemblies\v4.1\)

when I do

VolumeInfo[] volumes = VolumeInfo.GetVolumes();

it returns nothing

I've knocked up a code to detect when the card is inserted using interrupt port, and that is working ok - so at least there is power going to the sd card module!

I am using sandisk cards - could that be the problem (though i have used both 512mb and 2gb version)?

Baffled. Any other ideas?