Posted by DanA on 02 March 2012 - 05:02 PM in General Discussion

Posted by DanA on 02 March 2012 - 04:32 PM in Netduino 2 (and Netduino 1)

Posted by DanA on 20 February 2012 - 03:32 PM in General Discussion

Posted by DanA on 03 February 2012 - 05:44 PM in Visual Studio

Posted by DanA on 02 February 2012 - 09:05 PM in Visual Studio

Posted by DanA on 02 February 2012 - 05:00 PM in Netduino 2 (and Netduino 1)

Posted by DanA on 31 January 2012 - 05:25 AM in General Discussion

Posted by DanA on 30 January 2012 - 06:45 PM in Netduino Plus 2 (and Netduino Plus 1)

Posted by DanA on 30 January 2012 - 05:53 PM in General Discussion

Posted by DanA on 30 January 2012 - 08:01 AM in General Discussion

Posted by DanA on 25 January 2012 - 03:49 PM in Netduino Plus 2 (and Netduino Plus 1)

Posted by DanA on 25 January 2012 - 04:44 AM in Netduino Plus 2 (and Netduino Plus 1)

Posted by DanA on 24 January 2012 - 08:15 AM in Netduino Plus 2 (and Netduino Plus 1)

Posted by DanA on 22 January 2012 - 10:47 PM in Netduino 2 (and Netduino 1)

Some more ideas: 1. Every week have a "featured project". Video + narrative + code + fritzing diagram. Get one of your distributors to throw in a coupon or something to encourage participation? I don;t know about you - but I'm front and center every Friday for SparkFun's new product friday. "New Project Friday" would be even better IMO. 2. Extract great content from the forum and move it into the wiki (yes, we probably should be doing this ourselves - but maybe some leadership here would help us along?) 3. Buy and implement a couple SSL certs so that our passwords don't go clear text for forums and wikis (this is the new normal for any site that uses a password, if only to protect us from our own inappropriate password re-use) 4. Create, build and document the "Netduino Plus Plus" that has enough RAM for the SSL/Microsoft.SPOT.Net.Security Namespace. Thanks Dan

Posted by DanA on 22 January 2012 - 10:15 PM in Netduino Plus 2 (and Netduino Plus 1)

Posted by DanA on 22 January 2012 - 09:58 PM in General Discussion

Hi,

I do a little bit of everything (been in it for a long time). I try to stay on the technical side of things when I have a choice. For the past couple years I've been doing web application security work.

Have you seen the Irongeek USB HID dongle? It's a fun intersection between security and electronics. http://www.irongeek....eystroke-dongle

I made a MUCH less useful and functional, but similar idea, project with Netduino with help from Omar's (another forum member) library. http://diabolicalws....-simulator.html

You can totally jump in without too much electronics knowledge. I probably recommend that route. After a few little projects, I've become a lot more motivated to go review the basics then I ever was in the past. The basics are more fun when you have a cool project to apply them to.

If your focus is on communications, after you finish the book you have now and maybe get a couple projects under your belt - you may want to read this free eBook too: http://www.ghielectr...Things_Book.pdf

It's the GHI/FEZ "Internet of Things" book. Not all of it will "just work" given some library differences between GHI (FEZ Makers) and "SecretLabs" (Netduino Makers). But I've found it a valuable reference, at a great price.

Dan

Posted by DanA on 22 January 2012 - 04:21 AM in Project Showcase

Posted by DanA on 22 January 2012 - 04:09 AM in General Discussion

Hi Darth,

Welcome! As a nice coincidence, I'm in security also.

To your questions:

>just wondered how compatible all the different hardware components that you can buy are?

"Components" is maybe too generic to answer completely - components probably consists of numerous different things. Shields, sensors, components (resisters, capacitors, diodes, etc), displays, communications adapters(XBEE, RF, Ethernet, wifi, etc), actuators (motors, servos, solenoids, etc), etc.

Many of the Arduino shields work, others can be made to work with varying degrees of difficulty.

Some sensors that are more difficult to talk to (I'm thinking one-wire).

But most anything should be able to be made to work with enough effort and extra pieces - particularly if you can get good access to documentation (lots of it out there).

The wiki has some insight into things that have been tested already: http://wiki.netduino.com/

>do we have to come up with our own drivers for most of the stuff?

Yeah, unless someone has already done this (there is lots out there). But, really, this is part of the fun - after your first couple projects which will most likely be following someone else's projects or demos (blink the LED, etc).

>do you have any sites that i can go forth and read some literature on building different components and projects.

Google "Netduino" and whatever you are thinking about doing. Like "Netduino motor driver" or "Netduino robot" or "Netduino RGB LED". There are also some good example projects in the .NETMF sdk that will install as part of your setup for developing for the Netduino.

If you're looking for good intro material, Georgejh has written a great PDF available here: http://ghadzhigeorgiev.wordpress.com/

Also, GHI has some good stuff in their "Beginners guide to NETMF" here: http://www.ghielectr...de to NETMF.pdf

Depending on your prior experience - I might recommend the "Make: Electronics" book too.

>one last question, what other bits and bobs (hardware) should i buy.
>i was thinking of buying an arduino starter kit or something similar and trying to port the code and things over?

Your book will want you to have a 100k Pot. So you might plan to purchase one of those soon.

Otherwise, it almost completely depends on what you want to do. If the projects in the starter kit seem like they would be fun - go for it.

Other than that, generic things that I found to be very useful:
1. male to male jumper wires (a bit nicer then cuts of hookup wire)
2. a large breadboard

Once again - Welcome! This is a great forum that I am learning a lot from, I'm sure that you will too.

Dan

Posted by DanA on 17 January 2012 - 03:51 AM in Visual Studio

Posted by DanA on 14 January 2012 - 01:41 AM in General Discussion

Posted by DanA on 13 January 2012 - 02:01 AM in Netduino 2 (and Netduino 1)

Now that you mention it... The website seems a bit odd to me - in that there doesn't appear to be a path from the front of the site to the Netduino Plus info at all. I assumed that this was a conspiracy by the powerful shield maker's guild. Dan

Posted by DanA on 11 January 2012 - 07:59 AM in Project Showcase

Hi,

Thank you.

I'm sure I'll be shaking bugs out of it for awhile (I had kind of an embarrassing one today - too much networking and too little bit counting these days).

I hope to have the subscribe part done here in a week or so - I think this will add some interesting options.

@Spork - There is a node.js (server-side JavaScript) broker and client listed here: http://mqtt.org/software I haven't used it, but it seems like you might be able to use something like this. Maybe via a free hosting service like Nodester?

If you want to play with this without setting up a broker - the author of the Mosquitto MQTT broker has recently set up a test broker @ http://test.mosquitto.org/

Thanks again!
Dan

Posted by DanA on 11 January 2012 - 05:30 AM in Project Showcase

Hi,

I received a Netduino Plus for Christmas this year to keep my other Netduino company. After working my way through the "Internet of things" book from O'Reilly, I decided to write a Netduino MQTT client after hearing about MQTT a few weeks earlier.

MQTT is a light-weight protocol for machine to machine communications, or "Internet of things" communications. This seemed like a fun project with my goal being to monitor the temperature, of my desk... Which I sit at... But enough of that! - It's a Netduino with Ethernet! That is cool enough that it doesn't have to be useful yet.

I haven't got the temperature bit working (I bought a 1 wire sensor before I learned of the issues that choice brought with it - I'm waiting for an analog solution now ), but I have written an MQTT publisher/client that I thought I'd share with you. I've already learned so much from this forum (motor drivers, USB HID, shift registers, etc) that I hope that this might be useful to some of you in your future projects.

I have a page on my blog: http://diabolicalws....tduinomqtt.html

I have this hosted on Github here: https://github.com/d...an/NetduinoMQTT

MQTT operates in a publisher/subscriber model where you either post messages to a named topic or you can subscribe to a named topic. If you publish to that topic, all clients on that broker, who are subscribed to that topic - will get your message. At this point, I have only implemented the publish parts and the most basic QoS level.

If you download the code from GitHub, just add it to a Netduino Plus project, change the Program.cs as needed (IP address, login/passwd, etc), and deploy it, you can send MQTT messages to an MQTT broker (on button press for now).

This project was very fun - I found myself up at 4 in the morning on several occasions - awaiting "one more change". That hasn't happened for me in awhile, so it was quite fun.

Thanks
Dan

Posted by DanA on 22 December 2011 - 07:50 AM in Netduino 2 (and Netduino 1)

Hi,

I'm sure that this is covered somewhere in the conversation above, but it wasn't too clear for us - So we thought we should post in some detail what worked for us.

My son and I just did a similar project this evening (SparkFun "Magician" Chassis (http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10825) + SparkFun TB6612FNG Breakout (http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9457) + Netduino).

We wired it like so:

Netduino to TB6612FNG
DIO0 = Standby (This needs to be high (true))
DIO1 = AIN1
DIO2 = AIN2
DIO5 = PWMA
DIO6 = PWMB
DIO8 = BIN1
DIO9 = BIN2

TB6612FNG
VM = Motor power +
VCC = 5 volt on Netduino
AO1 = Red motor lead (Right)
AO2 = Black motor lead (Right)
BO2 = Black motor lead (Left)
BO1 = Red motor lead (Left)

(Its left/right when the front is the end with the wheels)

We connected all grounds (Netduino, motor power, TB6612FNG) together.

We started with ajcg1973's code (thanks!) from here: http://forums.netdui...tduino-tankbot/

Here's an example using his code with our pin selections.

OutputPort stby = new OutputPort(Pins.GPIO_PIN_D0, true);
AjbMotorTB6612FNG motors = new AjbMotorTB6612FNG(Pins.GPIO_PIN_D5, Pins.GPIO_PIN_D1, Pins.GPIO_PIN_D2, Pins.GPIO_PIN_D6, Pins.GPIO_PIN_D8, Pins.GPIO_PIN_D9);
motors.Motor1Direction = AjbMotorTB6612FNG.MotorDirection.Forward;
motors.Motor1Speed = 100;  // Set the motor to 100% speed
motors.Motor2Direction = AjbMotorTB6612FNG.MotorDirection.Reverse;
motors.Motor2Speed = 100;  // Set the motor to 100% speed

Set like this, "A" will be motor1 and "B" will be motor2.

The motors on this chassis don't respond at 10%. 20% seems around the bottom.

We flipped "forward" and "reverse" from how it's set in ajcg1973's code (We might be driving backwards (round end front?) - but the ball seems to follow better then lead.).

This will race around in a tight circle. Keep this in mind if your debug USB is still connected.

If you are using this motor driver - this PDF is useful: http://www.pololu.co...df?file_id=0J86

This is what worked for us - and nothing caught on fire, but YMMV.

We hope this helps someone else.

Thanks
Dan

Posted by DanA on 18 October 2011 - 05:01 PM in Project Showcase

case 34:        // "
    cb = 52;
    mod = 0x02;
    break;
case 39:        // '
    cb = 52;
    break;