I just did a blog post at: http://www.bitsconne...-crappy-surplus describing my experience whit the BOCS, including photos.



As a teaser, this is an image of what I added to the box.

For those of you following, I had no takers for a box opening party, but hopefully we can organize some Netduino Days at hackerspaces and other locations in the future.

I am definitely interested and would like to participate :-) Would anyone else be interested in having "box opening parties"? My thought is that a bunch of us could get together at a house, hackerspace or restaurant and all open the box together. We would all bring stuff to swap as well and then put our extra stuff into the box before sending it on to it's next destination. Not only would this save on shipping, but would be lots more fun to share the excitement with others. It would be educational as well in that instead of simply taking something out of the box and wondering "what could this be", there is a good chance that someone else would recognize it and perhaps say "oh, that's a switch from the from panel of a DEC PDP 8 just like I used to work on in college". I am in Northwest Maine, and would welcome any Netduino fan to my house anytime if you want to come by and "play" Netduino. For the box however perhaps Portland, Maine or Portsmouth, NH would be a more convenient place for a Netduino fan club get-together?

The BOCS left Phillips, Maine (USA) today (Tuesday, 11-OCT-2011) on its way to David Stetz. The Post Office tells me it will take 2-3 days, so hopefully David will have it by Friday. I took photos and will post them here later today.

The BOCS arrived in Maine! The box arrived here in Phillips, Maine yesterday. Is anyone interested in having a box opening party? I know Phillips is rather remote, so I am open to traveling to Portland, Bangor or Augusta ME to meetup with anyone who would like to share in the fun. I am even open to traveling to Portsmouth, NH if that is better for people. Please respond if you are interested. I do not want to hold the BOCS up too long, so we need to do thus soon if you are interested. Today is Tuesday, 4-OCT-2011. If nobody responds by tomorrow night, I will simply open it by myself and then send it along on Thursday.

Do you mean something like this? http://www.adafruit.com/products/601

Hi,

i want to use my netduino code on an trinamic eval board. it has a AT91SAM7X256 instead of AT91SAM7X512

I believe your biggest problem would be that the AT91SAM7X256 has 256 Kbytes of flash wile the Netduino has 512K. I wouldn't say absolutely that it is impossible to get the .NET MF into 256K, but it would be a major challenge.

Far better to select a chip with adequate memory.

I ordered and received one. As a watch goes, it is extremely thick and heavy. It definitely scores major geek points though :-)

I just got around to fooling with this and it isn't clear (to me) how to interface this to the Netduino. The video mentions interfacing the the USB but there are no details. I suppose I can look at their SDK but I believe it is C++ and would require some port to Netduino.

Has anyone actually interfaced this to a Netduino?

The easiest way to interface the TI chip to the Netduino is via the TTL level serial port, both boards have them.

I now have a prototype of a new open source slider module. Here is a photo of two of them:



I also wrote a blog post for slider module.

Perhaps there is some confusion about "localhost". It refers to the current computer, so if you use localhost on your PC, it refers to the PC. If however you use localhost in your Netduino program it would refer to the Netduino, not the PC. If you want to have the Netduino talk to the PC use the ip address of the PC, not localhost.

Tell us more about your sailboat,what kind, how big, do you liveon it etc.?

I have a LeComte NorthEast 38 sloop.

Many boats have expensive batteries,and monitoring them properly can make them last much longer and save a ton of money. Properly maintained (as in a data center) deep cycle batteries can last 10 years. Many boaters consider themselves lucky to get 3-4 years before replacing them.

If you want to do a really good job of battery monitoring consider using Kelvin 4-wire leads (http://en.wikipedia....erminal_sensing )

Hi dannykyle,

First off, welcome to the Netduino community. Once you get over your initial frustrations I believe you will have lots of fun learning with your Netduino.

If you find that your computer does not have a serial port connector, don't dispair. Their are other options.

In particular there are USB to serial converters that plug into a USB port on your computer. One thing to be careful of though is the voltage. "standard" serial uses 12 volts which is too high for a Netduino.

This cable might work for you as it uses Netduino compatible voltages: https://www.adafruit.com/products/70

Alternatively this might be even better: FTDI friend There is even a full tutorial on how to use it.

Danny,

Do you have a volt meter or multimeter?

If so, you should measure the voltage present on your motherboard's pins. Most serial interfaces use 12 volts which is too much for a Netduino. Please be careful.

thank you both for your replies. i, too, believe that i will really enjoy using this thing once i get over this first bump.

i have considered buying another device for interfacing, but i seem to be predisposed to doing things the hard way.

on my motherboard there is a 'COM1' rectangular 10 pin (minus one) socket. 5 pins on top, 4 on bottom. like this:

http://vip.asus.com/...SLanguage=en-us
http://www.frontx.com/cpx102_2b.html

i experimented today with pins D0 and D1 on the shield base connected to (what i think are) pins 2 and 3 of this socket. i got some lights and strange characters to come up on the program http://realterm.sourceforge.net/

but i do not know what the pinout is, nor which pins need to be connected, nor how to confirm the connectivity.


once all of that is done, i am confident i can trudge through the rest on my own.


your help is appreciated.


danny

Hello Mozsi and welcome to the wonderful world on Netduino!

I am not a Mac person, but I can tell you that having simple routines that allow reliable communication between a microcomputer and a desktop (e.g PC or Mac) is something that virtually everyone struggles with. The key hangup is reliability.

To be useful in the real world communication needs to be resilient; automatically recovering from such things as power failures, cables being unplugged and being plugged in again etc. If that is something you can workout it will be a great service to us all.

I don't know if this helps, but here is a project someone is doing for the Arduino: http://robotgrrl.com...no/matatino.php

From: http://channel9.msdn...mework-v42-RTWs

few months ago I mentioned that the next version of the .Net Micro Framework, v4.2, was in beta, Netduino is opening up to an wider audience with the .Net Micro Framework v4.2 release.

Well it's beta no more!

Version 4.2 RTM Today!! (Updated)

We are glad to announce today the RTM of the .NET Micro Framework version 4.2. You can download the SDK and PK as well as the all sources from our Codeplex project, client_v4_2 branch, at change number 13620. (We will be distributing 4.2 solely through the Codeplex site this time and not on downloads.microsoft.com)

Version 4.2 of the .NET Micro Framework Porting Kit provides the following new features:

Remote Firmware Update: The .NET Micro Framework SDK and PK now support updating your device firmware remotely.
Complete Cryptographic Object Model over PCKS #11: Most types and algorithms used in the desktop framework are now supported. PKCS #11 allows extensibility at the firmware level for adding new cryptographic tokens.
1-Wire, PWM and A/D object model: Support for PWM and A/D operations is now provided as a standard interface. 1-Wire is provided through a community development effort
SNTP and FTP (client and server): Support for SNTP and FTP is provided as a community development effort.
StringBuilder and Regex types: Support for StringBuilder and Regex is provided as a community development effort.
Transcendental functions for doubles in System.Math
VB.NET: The SDK now support VB.NET.
Support for Cortex M3 devices with STM32 processor family samples: The support for the STM32 family is provided as a community development effort and features two solutions for two different development boards. See the Porting Kit for details.
PKStudio: PKStudio supplements SolutionWizard to create solutions for the Porting Kit environment. See the Porting Kit distribution for details. (PKStudio code can be in the community branch under %SPOCLIENT%\CLR\Tools\PlatformDesigner\PKStudio and the binaries are instead in the %SPOCLIENT%\Tools\bin\PKStudio directory ready to use)

...

You can find white papers about crypto, firmware updates, and the Codeplex distribution in general on the documentation page of the project. You can find the general documentation on MSDN. PK documentation is in the distribution, under the documentation directory (you will find there also the full .chm help

Take a look at http://videos.analog...elopment-Board/

You can get one for $30 here: http://www.analog.co...ts/product.html

This board runs on 2 AA batteries and logs the data to an SD card. After your workout session you could put the SD card into your Netduino Plus and do whatever with the data.

This sounds like a marrage made in heaven Dan. Using the discovery board as a programmer for the proto module seems like a cheaper and more flexible solution rather than buying a separate programmer. Would you be willing to provide more details on your configuration?

I've attached an image of a bare PCB next to the discovery board. Note that the actual prototype area on the discovery is the parts below the routed slots. The part above those slots is the ST Link programmer, which is what I connect to the SWIM connector to program the chip on the protomodule.

Fabien, have you done a blog post or writeup on this? This is great information.

The detachable board on the STM8S has the necessary decoupling capacitors and features a 16 Mhz quartz for precision frequency counting / generation. Does the ProtoModule include a resonator or a quartz as well? For reference, here is the STM8S, detached from the STLink interface, with a Go! connector soldered to it:

Hi Mikeo2721,

I wear out a USB port on my computers just about every year. They're rated for thousands of insertion cycles--but it's amazing how many times I unplug/plug things around here testing engineering samples, etc.

Anyway, let's make sure we get you up and running...

Chris

Chris, If you wear out a USB port on a motherboard that can be an expensive fix ;-)

Have you considered using a USB extension cable (male on one end, female on the other) and leaving it plugged into the PC continuously? That way it would be the extension cable that would wear out, not the socket on the PC.

Pete Brown did an excellent presentation with lots of Netduino (and Netduino GO) goodness at South Florida code camp.
Gadgeteering and the .NET Micro Framework

This may be a wild and crazy idea, but why can't the waste heat from the LEDs be used in some way to heat the water in the aquarium? It just seems really wasteful to be cooling the LEDs at the same time as one is running a heater in the water. Some PCs are water cooled, is there any way to have a water cooled LED mount?

The code is far from 'perfect' but seems to work OK. There is one known issue. On rare occasions, the message string sent to the Netduino for setting the PWM has missing data. The Netduino will return a message informing you of the problem. To be blunt, I have no idea why, but at least it does not happen very often. I live near the BIG Chicago airport and I have issues with electronic items in the home at times. I 'think' it is from aircraft transmissions of some sort. Anyway, a plane is usually flying over and then have strange thing happen around here. Like hear voices on the TV and FM radio.

The usual way to handle situations like this, (namely sending data over noisy communications channels where the message can be garbled) is to include a checksum ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checksum) with the message.

Basicly the sender computes the checksum and includes it with the message. The receiver then gets the message and re-computes the checksum to confirm that the computed value matches the checkum received. If they do not then the receiver knows the message has been corrupted and treats it accordingly. (One standard practice is to simply ask the sender to re-send the message).

This may or may not be overkill for your purposes.

Tech Junkies just posted Open Source Robot Controls which uses a Netduino Plus. It is totally open source (hardware and software). The video is excellent and includes a walk-through of the Netduino code.

I just ran across this excellent, simple guide to connecting external parts to a microcontroller: http://cq.cx/interface.pl#10

It is not Netduino specific, but would work with any microcontroller.

One caution, in his examples he often shows the voltage level as 5 volts, which would be fine for an Arduino or many other microtrollers. The Netduino is a Netduino is a 3.3 volt device so just replace 5 V with 3.3V in his drawings.

He describe how to:

Light an LED from a Digital Output
Read Switch Contacts with a Digital Input
Read a Digital Signal that Goes from 0 V (LOW) to 10 V (HIGH)
Read (with Opto-Isolation) A Digital Signal
Measure a DC Voltage Between 0 V and 15 V
Measure a DC Voltage Between -15 V and 15 V
Measure a DC Voltage Between 0 V and 1.7 V
Measure the Position of a Potentiometer
Measure an Unknown Resistance
Measure a Temperature
Output Characters on an LCD
Switch a 100 mA, 10 V Load
Switch a 1 A, 10 V Load That Always Stays Connected to Ground
Switch a 10 A, 40 V Load
Switch a 120 VAC Load

I see Arduino has announced several new products ( http://arduino.cc/bl...ast-at-arduino/ ) including a new Wi-Fi shield.

I wonder if it will be Netduino compatible??

Anyway they will have them at Makerfare in NYC this weekend, so perhaps someone can check them out.