Just curious...when you received and opened your Netduino, what were your first impressions?

Anything we can do better to improve the "unboxing" experience?

I just received mine this weekend from the Maker Shed. I'm not sure exactly when it arrived, since I was out of town this weekend, but it was waiting patiently for me in the mailbox when I got home Sunday evening.

Around 9:00 PM I finally got a chance to open the box. I had ordered another item from Maker Shed, and at first I thought the Netduino had been back-ordered. After looking closer, I saw its little black anti-static bag with the blue label.

It's a little smaller than I expected (exact same footprint as Evil Mad Science's Diavolino board). I also found the little rubber feet and the tag, but I don't have a phone that will read it

I got VS2010 Express installed on my machine, then the .NETMF, and finally the Netduino package. I jumped right into the blinkenlight tutorial, and plugged in the Netduino. FWIW, mine didn't come with the micro-USB cable, but I have plenty from other devices, so it wasn't a show stopper for me.

At first, Win7 didn't install the driver - then I closed VS2010, unplugged and re-connected the Netduino, and the drivers installed fine.

Then I deployed the project to the board, and basked in the glow of the blinking blue light .

I must say, it's a better OOBE than my recent foray into the Arduino world (about a month ago). Arduino is cool and all, and I'm sure in many ways it made the Netduino possible. But the Arduino tools feel hacked together, and I've spent way more time futzing around with the tools than actually working on hardware.

This is what Arduino should have been, IMO. Leveraging Visual Studio, .NET MF, and C# was an inspired choice. It puts professional-quality development tools in the hands of hobbyists and startups.

This is very cool, and I can't wait to spend more time playing with it.

There is a .NET Micro Framework extension library project on the Codeplex called Grommet [^] that contains 'Asynchronus API XBee library' to communicate with XBee modules. I have not used it personally, though.

Cool, thanks for the tip!

Thanks, Chris, I'll take a look at the mftoolkit. Worst case, I suppose it probably wouldn't be too difficult to port an existing Arduino XBee library (although I haven't seen the source code). Thanks!

Hi folks,

I'm also very excited about the Netduino and the .NET goodness that it brings to the AVR microcontrollers .

Along the same lines as nirav's question - is there (or will there be) support for the XBee wireless Arduino shields?

For example:
http://www.sparkfun....roducts_id=8664

Thanks, and I can't wait until my Netduino board arrives!