Dan Morphis

Thanks Chris.
I happen to have a USB one, but it seems a much more complicated affair to get that working without a USB Host shield.
I'll probably rather get an RS 232 one.
Thanks for your input.

If you open up the device, I bet you'll find a TTL serial->USB converter chip. You could hack it and pull the data right from device before it goes into the chip. The two most common serial->usb chips are the PL2303 and FT232.

Doing that will keep you from having to buy another barcode scanner.

-dan

I discovered the Netduino a couple of days ago!
I have recently started development of internet-connected devices using the Arduino Uno and an Internet shield.
I am intriguded by the power of C#, multithreading, debug and the many other features of Netduino that make it easy and fast to develop internet-connected devices.
There are, however some drawbacks: limited product range, limited supported devices and related code, limited competition (price), limited support (just this forum?), fewer sample code available, ...

You have the experience, so help me make an informed decision:
1) Based on your experience, what are the 5 key reasons why Netduino is a better development tool for developping custom internet devices that Arduino

2) How do you deal with the restrictions/drawbacks compared to Arduino to reduce their importance

One of the big reasons for me why I use the NetMF platform using Netduino over Arduino is debugging. With Arduino, without going through a lot of gyrations, you have two basic ways of debugging. Serial.println, and flashing an LED. Serial.println works fine if you don't need to use the serial port(s) for other purposes.

With NetMF, you can do Debug.Print (or is it Console.WriteLine - don't my code in front of me), write out to a serial device, twiddle an LED, and most importantly, single step through the code to inspect what is actually going on. Another big thing is the code that you write, is the code that gets uploaded to the board.

With Arduino, if you use the Processing language and Arduino IDE, what you write is not what gets compiled and uploaded. A good example of this is some code I wrote last week, one of my preprocessor directives was wrong. The output from GCC which the Arduino IDE spit out said there was an error on line 133. My code didn't have a line 133. So I had to turn on verbose compiler output, so I could see where the actual file that the Arduino IDE was feeding to GCC was. Then open that file up and see what the actual error was.

That said, both platforms have their strengths and weaknesses.

Another big one is interrupts. Only pins D2 & D3 (IIRC) can be used to trigger interrupts. On the Netduino, any pin can trigger an interrupt. Interrupts are useful to have the microprocessor tell you when something has happened, instead of having to constantly monitor the state of a pin, and do your own checking on if the state of the pin has changed, and if that state is one you care about. For example, you can trigger when a pin goes high, goes low, or both.

-dan

I'm not very good at this yet, so, I was hoping that someone might be able to point me in the proper direction.

I have an application where I would like to use 2, 4 digit seven segment displays. The P/N's are BL 056C 4343UHR-11. I will be using a Netduino or a Netduino Plus (I have both). There are 14 pins on each set of 4 digits displays. I think that what I need is something like Adafruit's LCD backpack, but for LED's. I can also use some LED IC's; or, I am going to have to use a Go and gang the shields; but, I am looking for something a little more elegant (not to mention portability is a concern).

I would like to know is there is a backpack analog for LED's.

In earlier posts, there was a mention of a "SandBox". The link went nowhere. Is there a "SandBox"?

I'm not aware of a "backpack" for 7 segment LED displays. But you can easily use a shift register to drive the displays. This will cost you 3 pins on the Netduino, but gains you a virtually limitless number of pins. You can either use 4 8 bit shift registers like the ever popular 74xx595, or two 16 bit shift registers like the 74xx676. They do have 32 bit shift registers, but I can only seem to find them in surface mount.

-dan

Just as an update, while looking for a recommendation on which Ocilloscope to buy I came across this thread, the RIGOL DS1052E was mentioned as a good scope (I am sure that it still is).

While this model can still be found for sale I found that it has been replaced by the RIGOL DS1102E for the same price range as the older model (was $795.00 now $399.00) and has a 100mhz bandwidth. RIGOL DS1102E

The DS1102E doesn't replace the DS1052E. The DS1102E is a same board, chips, components, etc as the DS1052E, except it has a different label on it, and bit has been twiddled in the firmware to allow capture at 100 MHz. As @nakchak mentioned, with putty (or any other serial terminal program) and some very easy instructions on the net you can turn your DS1052E into a DS1102E.

-dan

Hello to all, I am new to the Netduino board programming and I would like some help or advise on getting started and creating cool projects.

all help and advise is greatly appreciated!

Welcome to the community!
What kind of issues are you having? What kinds of things would you like help on?

-dan