From netduino to commercial

Hello all, i have bought a netduino past months and love the way you debug your code and everything .NET enviroment offers. Now i am working on a project that will go commercial hopefully and i am wondering, being familiar with AVR and arduino style, what are the steps i have to take to transform a netduino project to a commercial one. So i am thinking of these steps: 1) Create a custom PCB board based on netduino schematic but with not all available netduino choices (less pins used or not I2c etc). 2) Ordering empty Atmel ARM microcontrollers from a reseller. 3) Somehow i have to program the bootloader and .net framework on the board and after that my running code from Visual Studio. This is the step with the most questions. Do i need a special programmer to download the bootloader to the IC... if so do i need to take care to have some special pins to the pcb for programming? Do i need to connect each board and download the software using Visual Studio? In classic AVR i had an ISP programmer, download the bootloader and use it to download new firmware etc. What is the procedure to go with a .net and netduino? 4)Another important aspect is security, is there a fuse or something to lock the application running on the microcontroller? How can we secure it from third parties or unwanted eyes. These are some of my thought right now and i dont know if i should continue my developing on this platform or fall back to the AVR path. Thank you very much!

Hi kostasthegreat, To download the bootloader (TinyBooter) to the ARM microcontroller on your commercial board, you can use the same process as the Netduino--flash using Atmel's SAM-BA tool. You can do this over the USB connection...or over the DBGU serial port (pins D0/D1 on the Netduino) if USB is not connected. There are also "fast flashing" processes available. And ways to lock down the firmware. More info on this is contained within the AT91SAM7X datasheet. Another thing of interest...you may be interested in using the RTM build of .NET Micro Framework, which omits debugger code and runs faster. Just compile using the "flavor=rtm" option. More info on this is contained within the .NET MF Porting Kit documentation. Chris

Hi kostasthegreat,

To download the bootloader (TinyBooter) to the ARM microcontroller on your commercial board, you can use the same process as the Netduino--flash using Atmel's SAM-BA tool. You can do this over the USB connection...or over the DBGU serial port (pins D0/D1 on the Netduino) if USB is not connected.

There are also "fast flashing" processes available. And ways to lock down the firmware. More info on this is contained within the AT91SAM7X datasheet.

Another thing of interest...you may be interested in using the RTM build of .NET Micro Framework, which omits debugger code and runs faster. Just compile using the "flavor=rtm" option. More info on this is contained within the .NET MF Porting Kit documentation.

Chris

More information about this things... will be very excellent!

How about adding an example of doing this to the Wiki? I for one would appreciate it.

How about adding an example of doing this to the Wiki? I for one would appreciate it.

Perfect!