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.

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.

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!

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:

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/

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).

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.

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/

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).

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, 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

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.

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

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

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.

That's good advice. And I've looked at going straight to the USB version of the RFID reader. My big motivation for using the Netduino though is that I'd like to add more then one sensor and even some other inputs (switches, knobs, etc) and have it do all the physical device handling. That way, I only plug one device into the system and get an array of data out of it.

In this case you could try to turn your netduino into a proper HID USB device. I haven't tried it yet myself but there is a sample in the .NET MF SDK that shows how to make a virtual mouse.

Here is also excellent article written by Michel Verhagen on GuruCE that shows how to communicate with .NET application using WinUSB driver: http://guruce.com/bl...cation-over-usb Looks like bit more work but it might be worth to give it a try.

In both cases you will probably loose ability to debug on the device via USB so you will need serial cable anyway. I surly can't wait until netduino guys figure out how to make this easier.

Nice project, I was curious what is the board that you are using that is connected to the Netduino?---AJB

It's the Adafruit's prototyping shield http://www.adafruit....&products_id=51

I'm really enjoying the device so far.

The application I'm working on uses the Parallax RFID reader which is talking to the Netduino as a serial device on D0 so, I'd have to look at D2/D3 for getting data out. Having a way to talk over the USB would be huge, since it would keep the whole solution smaller, simpler and cheaper.

I would be happy to share once I get something that's ready to share.

I'm looking to port this WPF PING sensor application over to the Netduino as well.

Hi futileboy,
If all you want is get the RFID data to PC you actually don't need netduino for that. You can simply connect it directly with the FTDI Serial-to-USB cable.
http://www.adafruit....&products_id=70
http://www.sparkfun....roducts_id=9718

Or you can just get the USB version of the same Parallax RFID reader.
http://www.parallax....17/Default.aspx

Then it will show as virtual comport that you can access using System.IO.Ports.SerialPort class (I should have some sample code if you need help).

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.

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

Hi,
I have published my second project. This time I upgraded the robotic kit from oomlout with Netduino. The robot uses continous rotation servos as differential drive (works great with Chris Seto's Servo class). It also uses Nintendo Wii Nunchuck as contoller (and includes my WiiChuck driver) and adds wireless communication via pair of XBees.

Here is the blog post http://geekswithblog...ervo-robot.aspx

The source code is here: http://cid-4c7ec0c21...b^_20100831.zip

This time no video because its to dark now. Let me know if I should make one tomorrow :-)

Thank you for writing the WiiChuck driver! I was going to take a stab at this, but now I don't have to. AWESOME! Thank you SO much, you have provided so much help to us newbies. :-)

No problem. Now we can be Netduino Ninjas :-)

Let me know how it works out for you or if you have any suggestions how to improve it.

I change the jumper for Vref to the 5 V source. This did a find job of centering the signal, but the max values were very unstable. I guess I was over driving the A/D. So I cut the trace from 5 V to the joystick and added a wire from 3.3 to the joystick and Vref. Now every thing works just fine. See the attachment.

Thanks for sharing your findings.

Looks like the fact that Vref is not connected on Netduino causes troubles with some shields, and also is bit confusing for people comming from arduino. Maybe Chris could explain why it was done this way and if there is any technical difficulty to make it connected by default to 3V3 in future revisions.

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