As the topic states, what prototype shield would you recommend?

Yesterday I received bunch of these shields ordered from Adafruit:
http://www.adafruit....&products_id=51
http://www.adafruit....products_id=187

Haven't tried them yet with Netduino, but I had used the first one in past with Arduino and I think its very well designed. Especially if you plan to test some ICs than it has a dedicated pads for it (up to 20 pins). You also get two LEDs and general use button. Important to note that reset button is brought up so it's not obscured by the shield. Important to note that board is double-sided so you can solder on both sides.

If you don't need the extra components you can order just the PCB for half the price:
http://www.adafruit....&products_id=55
But you also need the headers http://www.adafruit....&products_id=85
Or if you don't plant to stack shields simple break-away headers like this (you can cut them easily to proper length):
http://www.sparkfun....products_id=116

The other shield is just regular single-sided prototyping surface but you get lots of free space.

Well I keep finding cool stuff and get sidetracked from current projects, but this has gone to the top of my list.

http://www.adafruit....products_id=285

Can I use that with the netduino? It would be extremely awesome if I could stick it to some clothing and make cool paterns.

Yes, but you will need externall power supply, because most of these RGB strips require 12V. And to control brightness of individual RGB channels the LED driver chip will be best. There is already library for the Allegro A6281 based boards:

http://forums.netdui...-a6281-library/

I am thinking down the road as far as projects are concerned, but I was wondering if the Netduino can be programmed to transfer data to and from the Netduino running in a standalone mode to a PC. For Example, a button is pressed on the Netduino or an analog value is registered and it sends useable results to a program running on a PC - outside of the Visual.net framework.

Hi Greg,
Please see here for discussion of this topic http://forums.netdui...talking-to-wpf/

I shoot the video either with Logitech QuickCam 9000 Pro or with Canon 550D camera. For editing I simply used Movie Maker from Windows Live Essentials. Was sufficent to Combine two videos and add title and end pages. Some cool transition animations are in the new beta version. You can download it free here http://explore.live....essentials-beta I upload my videos to vimeo:

And if you really need a much more powerful device maybe you should take a look at http://beagleboard.org/

Are there any others I should look into? I'm on the Windows platform, BTW.

Did you look at Fritzing? It's what I use to document schematics for my projects.
And CW2 already created Fritzing part for Netduino.

Does anyone know what font is used for the 'netduino' trademark on the board? I am working on a custom part for Fritzing (preview attached), and that is the only thing I am missing.

Awesome! I'm glad that you took care of this.

I just finished drawing schematics for my tutorial, but I had to use arduino part and would love to replace it.

Give my new library a try.

Use it to control Allegro A6281 based RGB LED boards (Brilldea PolkaDOT and various from Macetech.)
I have a daisy chain of 8 running off my Netduino (only USB power so far.)
It is a little light on documentation, but the sample application should get you going.

Let me know what you think.

uA6281 on Codeplex.com

Hi SupraBitKid,
You beat me to it! I have my lib for already working with ShiftBrites and was ready to publish it soon :-)
Now I guess I will look at yours to see if I can contribute anything.

Great work. Thanks for posting!

It's using GHI's EM module on the back, so i wouldn't be surprised. Is it just me, or did just about everything he tried to show working... not?

Oh, I haven't noticed the GHI EM module on video but indeed this looks similar to FEZ components. Anyway, I think the software side of this might be interesting as well. I hope they will release the code as open source so we can get a good library of drivers for bunch of cool modules.

Take a look here: http://blog.makezine..._gadgeteer.html Gadgeteer is very interesting project for rapid prototyping of embedded devices built by Microsoft Research team in Cambridge. Of course .NET MF is heart of a project. http://research.micr...er/default.aspx Not much information on the project page right now but I hope we can find out more soon. In particular it would be interesting to learn what board they use, and if it can be made compatible with Netduino (maybe via a dedicated component shield).

Would we get any notification (event) when card is inserted or removed?

Hi, Last couple of days I was trying to write drivers for the DS18B20 one-wire temperature sensor. I converted the code from arduino library found here: http://milesburton.c...Control_Library Since it relies on one-wire protocol I also tried to convert the OneWire arduino library. The latest version is here: http://www.pjrc.com/...bs_OneWire.html Unfortunatelly I couldn't get it to work using managed ports (I used a TristatePort for data pin). I first confirmed my setup is correct by connecting the sensor to Arduino. It works fine there. I think the problem again is the correct timing. I don't have an osciloscope so I can't confirm this, but since one-wire doesn't even use a clock pin it has to rely on tight timings. As explained on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Wire to transmit logical "0" master needs to send short 1-15 µs pulse. To send "1" the pulse should be 60 µs. The arduino code implements direct write through registers and microsecond delays. I don't think we can achieve this timing accuracy in managed code as was already observed by Pavel Bánský http://bansky.net/bl...k/comments.html However guys from GHI have included one-wire support in their firmware. So I run the same code for the temperature sensor on FEZ Mini board (but using their OneWire library instead) and this time it works perfectly. Chris Seto implemented it on FEZ a while ago as well http://files.chrisseto.com/8DC So I'm afraid that to interface with this type of devices we would need native support in the netduino firmware. It doesn't look very complex so I hope it could be added quickly. EDIT: I submited change proposal to the .NET MF team http://www.netmf.com...bf-3e8d70abfffb

Thats great news! Let me know if I can help with testing or anything.

Here is my delay microseconds method:

        private const long TicksPerMicrosecond = TimeSpan.TicksPerMillisecond/1000;

        private static void DelayMicroseconds(int microSeconds)
        {
            long stopTicks = Utility.GetMachineTime().Ticks + 
                (microSeconds * TicksPerMicrosecond);

            while (Utility.GetMachineTime().Ticks < stopTicks) { }
        }

Alright so I run a little home server that I can set-up a website in and My radio station so on...
Could I set it up as a 'middle man' [middle computer in this case ] so one Netduino can talk to the other using ethernet shields? I would love to set up a thing where you get a account # and password and it allows you to send info back and forth! FREE of course.

OMG 'Netduino IM' LOL how funny would that be!?!?!

I think what you are talking about is called Machine-to-Machine communication (M2M) http://en.wikipedia....hine-to-Machine

Incidently recently I came across an OS platform that can handle this called Mango M2M http://mango.serotoninsoftware.com/

Slightly different angle would be the notion of Sensor Web. One example would be the OGC Sensor Web Eneblement initiative http://www.opengeosp...echnologies/swe and example implementation is here http://52north.org/S...oxf/index.html. Another popular example is http://www.pachube.com/

I'm interested in these topics myself so please let us know if you make any progress with this.

According to this post the PWM is currently set to fixed clock of 10KHz http://forums.netdui...findpost__p__42 Current implementation of PWM.SetDutyCycle uses values in range 0 from 100 to express the duration of high state in the cycle as percentage. So duty cycle 0 is always off and duty cycle of 100 is always on. But if I understand correctly this is with the default 10KHz clock. On the other hand PWM.SetPulse lets you control the period and duration of the waveform directly. So you should use one of the functions - not both at the same time. Chris also mentioned they want to expose more PWM functions in next firmware.

Hi Pete,

Did you look at this thread
http://forums.netdui...__fromsearch__1

Actually I think this explains it better http://forums.netdui..._2411#entry2411

That would be realy cool. Would even do greater distances and could use a switch for connecting them..

In the meantime I recommend reading the "Making Things Talk" book that dicusses many other communication technologies.
http://oreilly.com/c...g/9780596510510

Maybe it will give you some ideas. In any case let us know what you came up with.

Moving this discussion from the main forum. I think the bigest benefit for RepRap would be to use Netduino Plus. With network connection it could work just like a regular printer. And the SD card would be used as a print buffer, so one could send the whole print job, and turn off the computer (3D printers are still quite slow). Indeed this sounds as a very exciting thing to do. Hopefuly some people in Japan are already working on this (the shield was designed by Kenzo Yoshida).

That's a fantastic idea.

Do you think it would make sense to use the USB port on the regular Netduino to make a RepRap type of device which could be printed via USB as well?

Yes, I think this might work too. But I think Ethernet+SC card combo would make it more interesting. I will try to digg why people are looking to use ARM boards for RepRap in general. Maybe Arduino has other limitations they want to solve this way.

Hi, In the tech specs the digital pins 7-8 are labeled as UART 2 RTS, and CTS. I'm thinking to use it with XBee since the RTS and CTS is nicely available on the header in adafruit's xbee adapter that I'm using. But I'm not sure how to enable the hardware flow control. I looked at the SerialPort class and don't see any options in the constructor or otherwise. Did I missed something here? Thanks, -Szymon

Have a look at SerialPort.Handshake property.

Thanks CW2, it didn't occured to me that this property would be related. However there is only Handshake.RequestToSend (RTS) value, so should I assume it will enable CTS as well?

@greg
Probably I don't need it right now, but asked out of curiosity since it was mentioned in Netduino tech spec. I'm also reading the documentation for XBee module that mentioned flow control (p.27) thus I wanted to see how this works.
http://ftp1.digi.com.../90000976_F.pdf

Slightly out of topic: does anyone here looked at the ZigBee application profiles? I wonder if it would be hard to implement one in .NET MF. In particular I'm looking at the home automation profile: http://www.zigbee.or...n/Overview.aspx

Hi,
I'm working on a larger project for Netduino Plus. I was hoping to use System.Http.dll but it turns out that I'm running out of memory when I try to deploy the whole project. So I started looking how the memory is allocated.

First here are the assemblies that are included wiht the Netduino Plus firmware:

mscorlib (4.1.2821.0) (3880 RAM - 33236 ROM - 19134 METADATA)
Microsoft.SPOT.Native (4.1.2821.0) (1144 RAM - 6516 ROM - 4479 METADATA)
Microsoft.SPOT.Hardware (4.1.2821.0) (1752 RAM - 11440 ROM - 7371 METADATA)
Microsoft.SPOT.Net (4.1.2821.0) (704 RAM - 5060 ROM - 2452 METADATA)
System (4.1.2821.0) (872 RAM - 5992 ROM - 3206 METADATA
Microsoft.SPOT.IO (4.1.2821.0) (740 RAM - 4620 ROM - 2522 METADATA)
System.IO (4.1.2821.0) (1548 RAM - 13292 ROM - 5862 METADATA)
Microsoft.SPOT.Hardware.SerialPort (4.1.2821.0) (508 RAM - 3440 ROM - 1527 METADATA)
Microsoft.SPOT.Hardware.Usb (4.1.2821.0) (580 RAM - 3740 ROM - 1844 METADATA)
SecretLabs.NETMF.Hardware (4.1.0.0) (256 RAM - 1108 ROM - 491 METADATA)
Total: (10320 RAM - 88444 ROM - 48888 METADATA)

As you can see in total it consumes about 88KB of RAM and I think most of these libraries are essential for any project. Well maybe apart from Microsoft.SPOT.Hardware.Usb - I guess most of network devices won't need ot connect as USB client. But it gains us only about 4KB.

When I add System.Http to blank project I can deploy it but it leaves very little ROM left. Here are the additional assemblies:

Microsoft.SPOT.Net.Security (4.1.2821.0) (264 RAM - 1220 ROM - 606 METADATA)
System.Net.Security (4.1.2821.0) (664 RAM - 4544 ROM - 1943 METADATA)
System.Http (4.1.2821.0) (2976 RAM - 38160 ROM - 12831 METADATA)

So in total it will add almost 44KB ROM. Of this about 6KB is used for the security assemblies. I guess this is requried to support HTTPS. I don't need it for my project at the moment so it would be cool to turn it off. (Again, I wish .NET MF had a post compile linker like MonoTouch to strip the code that is not executed in the project).

According to the tech spec Netduino Plus has only 48KB ROM left for our code. So with System.Http it leaves us with only about 4KB. It's really not enough for anything beyond a most basic project. For example for my project I estimate at least 15KB be needed.

So for now System.Http is no go, and I will try to implement basic HTTP functions on my own. But I hope there is a way to reduce the size of these libraries somehow so we get at least 15-20KB ROM more.

Hi Syzmon,

Building off what Chris said, you might want to compile your own HTTP library. I highly suggest you use code from the .NET MF Toolkit (http://mftoolkit.codeplex.com/). Michael Schwarz is the creator of that project. The .NET MF Toolkit contains a library for HTTP. Download the latest changeset from the source code, change the project references from .NET MF 3.0 to version .NET MF 4.1, and lastly compile. You will be using the dll's built from the MicroHttp project.

You can easily remove classes and what not from the project that you won't use to reduce the amount of space the assemblies take up.

Hi,
I already started triming down the MicroHTTP project. Initially it consumed 37KB because it also used the security libraries, but after commenting out SSL support and removing few other classes I got it down to 26K.

However this implementation is targeting scenario where .NET MF device acts as HTTP server (accept requests and sends responses). For current project I need it to act as a client and connect to remote HTTP server. So I was planing to add these functions to the library.

Chris mentionsed another way - to take the existing System.Http.dll appart and try to trim it down (I forgot it has Appache license and we can do this). If I can get it down to 30KB it should be fine.

-Szymon

Hi Eric, Maybe this example will help you get started: http://geekswithblog...nking_leds.aspx It shows how to use a shift register to talk with two 7 segment LED modules.