GDSever

Hey! Thanks for your interest in the project.

Schematics are available in the Eagle files (as well as my PCB layouts) - available for download from my OneDrive:

https://onedrive.liv...FCDC3DBD261!366

I am not doing anything with solenoids / valves (don't really need to) but I turn the pumps on & off with a pair of 10A SSRs from Crydom. They are probably overkill, but better safe than sorry, as far as I am concerned.

Hope that helps!

Well, after exhausting all of my other possibilities I finally did what you suggested, Chris, back on January 21. With the shield removed and jumper wires connecting the COM1 pins and 5V/GND to the shield, the Netduino does not reset (although the huge data packet is still sent to periodically, the code handles it without reset). 

I still need to track down why the COM1 "dump" occurs in the first place with the DIGI folks.

Well my wishful thinking was just that... My random reboot issue is not gone, it's still causing me headaches.

I did narrow it down to the routine that reads data from the SerialPort. There is a ton of data that comes in, apparently faster than the routine can process it, and at some point during that process it causes the Netduino to reboot.

My question is - can overloading the SerialPort cause a hardware reset, through overflow or otherwise?

I still need to contact Digi support to see if they can make any sense of the byte stream that is coming in and tell me if they see any potential reason / cause why the XBees would be doing this, but I thought I could at least see if there were some programmed failsafe that causes hardware reboots for SerialPort overflows...

I did find a small issue with the MCP23017LcdTransferProvider class related to the sequential write capabilities of the two banks. Whenever I wrote out to the LCD, it was messing up the I/O states for the other bank. The cause is one of the settings in the IOCON register. Adding the following to the end of the SetUpExpander subroutine resolves that:  

            ' In either case, you do not want the expander doing sequential writes...            lExpander.WriteRegister(MCP23017.Registers.IOCONA, MCP23017.IOCONBits.SEQOP)            lExpander.WriteRegister(MCP23017.Registers.IOCONB, MCP23017.IOCONBits.SEQOP)

Not sure it helps, but I am using a Netduino 1 running 4.2 and VS2010 and I am using bit shifter operators in my VB code without any issue.