Wow, ok... Here are a few pictures of the build... Scott...

Michael, Dan:

You are precisely correct. The RTM was scheduled to ship on Monday of this week so we decided it wouldn't make sense to have an RC2 for a week only to replace it by the RTM version. Also, the new AnalogPort/AnalogInput class was still being changed post-RC2 and we wanted that to settle before we integrated in the SAM7X-specific code.

We're going to build an "RC3" firmware to match the .NET MF 4.2 firmware...to make sure that users don't experience any BSOD issues. This should be the first "release-quality" 4.2 firmware. From there, we'll take input from users and get things ready for an official 4.2 firmware release (and pull in the new PWM and AnalogInput objects). We may do a few RCs until the community tells us that we're good to go--but that process should go pretty quickly.

I'm excited about 4.2. In addition to VB support and GC bugfixes, there are also new features and networking enhancements. Thanks to the testing and feedback of the NETMF community, this will likely be the highest quality NETMF release to date.

Chris

Have they fixed the "unplug the USB / replug the USB" everytime you want to deploy bug?

Scott...

Sweet! My younger brother is wanting to do exactly what you are doing. I'll let him know! Scott...

Awesome! Thank you, I'll give that a shot... Scott...

I bought a Sparkfun Serial LCD backpack http://seismo.sparkf...om/products/258 to hook up to one of my parallel 20x4 LCDs. Soldered it up, and the backpack/lcd works fine except I can only access 16x2 of the LCD. On the sparkfun site they show 16x2 and a 20x4 firmware for this backpack. I assume I need to flash the backpack with the 20x4 firmware. Problem is, I have no idea how to do this and Sparkfun is not showing up in their own forums to answer my question, so hoping some of you good people have an idea how I would do this. Questions: 1) Have any of you hooked this backpack up to a 20x4 LCD? 2) Do you have to reflash to use the 20x4 LCD? 3) How do I go about reflashing this? Do I need a pic programmer, or is there a way to flash it from a netduino? Thanks, Scott...

Nevermind! Fixed my own problem. Deleted everything in the bin/debug and release dir, rebuilt and it deployed fine. Must have been old dlls causing the problem. Sorry for the churn. Scott...

Bought a 2nd Netduino plus to use as a development environment so I didnt have to reboot my other one all of the time and loose all of the stats it has kept to that point. It was working great until about an hour ago. Now I get the following error when I try to deploy to the netduino+ The sequence of events was as follows: 1) I was writing a program that polled a variety of sensors (Barometric Pressure, wind speed, dir, temp) 2) I was adding support for Onewire from the Onewire ALPHA firmware to the code. I hadn't upgraded the firmware and it was getting an error during deploy. 3) I remembered that I hadn't deployed the Onewire ALPHA firmware, so I downloaded and deployed the firmware with MFDEPLOY. 4) After deploying the onewire firmware I still constantly get the following error. I have commented out all references to the onewire classes. ------ Build started: Project: Netdueather, Configuration: Debug Any CPU ------ Netdueather -> C:\Users\scott\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\Netdueather\Netdueather\bin\Debug\Netdueather.exe ------ Deploy started: Project: Netdueather, Configuration: Debug Any CPU ------ An error has occurred: please check your hardware. Object reference not set to an instance of an object. Source: Microsoft.SPOT.Debugger.CorDebug Stack : at Microsoft.SPOT.Debugger.VsProjectFlavorCfg.Deploy() in c:\depot\current\CLIENT_V4_1\Framework\CorDebug\VsProjectFlavorCfg.cs:line 893 at Microsoft.SPOT.Debugger.VsProjectFlavorCfg.<Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Interop.IVsDeployableProjectCfg.StartDeploy>b__0() in c:\depot\current\CLIENT_V4_1\Framework\CorDebug\VsProjectFlavorCfg.cs:line 634 ========== Build: 1 succeeded or up-to-date, 0 failed, 0 skipped ========== ========== Deploy: 0 succeeded, 1 failed, 0 skipped ==========

Using a Tektronics MSO 2012 (100 MHz) scope, I observed over 1 volt of noise on the 5 volt supply, all of it negative going. I am assuming the actual noise is greater than what I observed due to the limitations of my scope's bandwidth. Also the MAX chip should ignore the noise unless it is greater than that. I observed that the noise disappears if the reset button is held down, indicating to me that the CPU and/or the Ethernet/PHY chip is creating the noise by requiring different current draws as it runs.

I am assuming the 10uF caps on the Netduino Plus's linear supplies are not large enough to handle the short term spikes in current demand. What noise levels have you seen?

Robert,

I saw the same thing with both my 5V and 3.3V lines coming from my netduino+. I switched over to powering the netduino with a wall wart, and added dedicated 5V and 3.3V regulators to my circuit supplied from the VIN line on the netduino. Smoothed the supply voltage right out.

Scott...

I want to read and store data from an accelerometer and I'm just wondering what the best practice is, or what the limitations are.
I have this accelerometer, and this is (hopefully soon) on it's way.

I'm just wondering what to do. I could:

• Try to write data to the SD-card as fast as possible directly from the x, y and z axis.
• Average the data using one or three threads and store the average value every second or so.
• Just pull a sample every second or so and store that.

I believe the first method would be best for analysis. I can run some tests and find the best algorithm for reating the data afterwards. However, can it be too much for the SD card, perhaps? Or how fast can the Netduino Plus sample data?

Method three is the easiest to implement, but I could be missing information I'm interessted in.

Method two is the one I'll use eventually, I believe, as it shouldn't be necessary to keep that much data.



If this had been a Windows application, I'd say just store the data and process them later. But on a little more limited hardware I'd like to know what I should do.

I am doing this exact same thing with my weatherstation project. http://forums.netdui...itor-webserver/

I use the netduino+ to sample the sensors. I have a single "stats" class that contains the values for each of the readings I am taking. So, the main program just calls a class to sample a sensor, gets that reading, and calls a stats class method to update the value for that sensor. In that method, I check to see if the value is higher or lower than my min/max values I have stored. If so, the class updates min and max, and saves a timestamp for min and max.

Every 1 second a thread wakes up and sends the values (via xml) over a socket to a server running on another PC. This server has the same stats class implemented, and it keeps averages every 1 minute, day, hour, week, month, year, and since inception. Every 1 minute a thread in the server wakes up and saves the 1 minute average to an XML log file that I can later pull into excel to do all of the trending that I want.

So, in a nutshell, isolate the main program from the statistical work via a stats class. Have the stats class summarize the data and write it where ever you want to. I chose to do this on a separate PC/Server because I was running low on memory on the netduino, and I want to write a web interface to the weatherstation. Too much work for the netduino+ IMHO.

Hope that helps,
Scott...