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.NET Gadgeteer — Microsoft's Arduino Killer?
mikejuk writes ".NET Gadgeteer is a new open source platform, from Microsoft Research, based on the use of the .NET Micro Framework. It brings with it lots of hardware modules that are backed by object oriented software. You simply buy the modules you need — switches, GPS, WiFi etc — that you need and plug them together. The software, based on C#, is also open source, and comes with classes that let you use the modules without having to go 'low level.' Is this a competitor for the Arduino?"
Can anyone think of any example when a [fill-in-the-blank-popular-or-niche-object-of-consumption] killer has ever killed a [fill-in-the-blank]? Calling something a [fill-in-the-blank] killer seems to admit at the outset that the market belongs to [fill-in-the-blank].
Has Microsoft produced any hardware platform in the past 20 years that was a "X killer"? All the ones I've seen tend to choke on their own drool instead of "killing" a competitor.
The type of person who cares about open anything is the same type who will avoid anything with a Microsoft logo. That alone will kill any potential this platform has.
Simple reason: The base board looks like it needs connectors best I can tell and costs 4x as much as an arduino board. Plus I'm sure the MS board requires windows. I have an arduino because I can interface with it on different platforms and it didn't cost a ton to get into.
I predict that this will be as successful as Microsoft's "ipod killer". What was that thing called again?
This looks like a solution in search of a problem. How often must someone go low-level with an arduino? It's the community, not the hardware that have made that platform successful. And if I need to do something, chances are someone has already written code to do just that, and made it available to the community. I don't have to code much of anything, only tweak what I find.
-I only code in BASIC.-
...in the same sentence. I think most electronics DIY'ers (including me) are Linux/C/assembler types who have no interest in supporting MS..
The irony there is that the Zune was a much better device than the Apple iPods of the time. It was poorly marketed, and ugly. But technologically it was better than what Apple was doing at the time.
"arduino killer" is not Microsoft's term. They call it a ".NET gadgeteer" or something.
I love that some blogger calls it a "arduino killer" and all of a sudden, "Microsoft's trying to kill the cute little arduino".
Arduino is cool as hell. My daughter and I have been having a blast with a couple of them that we bought just to goof off with.
The .NET Gadgeteer also looks pretty cool, though I don't know much .NET framework. Oh well, I'll let my kid learn that stuff. I'm not that interested, but I don't see any reason why we should find anything negative in this gadgeteer thing from MS.
You know which very rich and successful and famous high-tech company is NOT making an open platform for us to play with?
Seriously, go back ten years, twenty. Now ask yourself which company would come out with something like this Gadgeteer first, Apple or Microsoft. Which company would lock up its handhelds behind a walled garden. Which company would stash profits for a war chest to buy its competitors instead of paying its shareholders a dividend. Sometimes things don't go the way you would suspect.
You are welcome on my lawn.
But what's the power consumption on that? Arduino became popular not just because of the cost, but because of the power consumption and ease of use as well. $120 for something that includes all sorts of stuff that I might not need is hardly a good deal.
I don't think so. The success of the Arduino revolves around how easy it is to get it to reach out and touch something using all the pin interfaces (turn on a LED, control a motor, use PCM to regulate your barbeque temperature. Now there does seem to be a small overlap, it's can't complete with the arduino over it's entire range of applications.
I wont say this will kill anything, but it sounds fun. I'm betting this works with kinect soon. And, as a C# developer (along with many other langs) this sounds like a quick way to start projects to teach my kids robotics. Currently I still lean towards Mindstorm, but options are always good.
Where genius and insanity become confused true wisdom is found
Was that a particularly difficult task to accomplish in the first place?
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I don't think this will be an Arduino killer. Arduino has too big a lead, and too much traction in the DIY, hacker, and arts communities. But it will appeal to companies that do software and are looking to break into embedded hardware. They're already familiar with .NET, C#, and Visual Studio, and they won't mind paying a premium for the hardware, because it's Microsoft-backed and because they already know the dev tools.
It might also find a home in the industrial space. Lots of manufacturing facilities have bright people who program PLC's and the like, and are quite capable of learning the tools and building simple stuff that can round out a company's automation efforts.
I don't love Microsoft, but kudos to them for branching out creatively in an effort to shore up their sagging fortunes.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Creating a devices that come with software bits that enable the control and interfacing between your programs and the hardware devices which more easily enables you to make the devices do useful things!! I can't believe no one has thought of this before!! Next thing you know, someone will tie all of these software-hardware interface modules (let's call them drivers for short) into a bundle that lets them share a common pool of resources such as processor time and memory more efficiently... "in an object oriented way" of course because unless it was done with "objects" it couldn't be new or novel could it?
I know -- laugh me right off of slashdot right here and now. The second programming language I learned was assembly language for 8 and 16 bit Motorola processors. (The first was BASIC.) Assembly language taught me how computers really work. All this "object oriented" crap is just an abstraction that helps people see programming in ways that aren't even natural to the machines and how they run. I prefer to see things as they are, not how I want them to be. It's all still bits, bytes, signals, registers, inputs and outputs. Sure, you can imagine it's all some sort of flowers and sunshine microcosm where causes and effects happen magically just like they do in the real world (hint: the real world isn't magical either and there ain't no god that makes it all work either). It's all a bunch of tiny, tiny operations that accomplish bigger things. (Hell, for that matter, even the complex instructions in today's processors are really just simple instructions running on smaller processors... anyone ever wonder what "microcode" is and why/how we always see that "microcode update" line in the booting of Linux? Yeah... I knew and have known for a long time... long enough to chuckle to myself when the "RISC vs CISC" debates were going on. (Hint: It's ALL "RISC" now even if it wasn't in the early 8/16 bit days... it would have been horribly more difficult to scale processors to the size and performance we see today without building it all out on RISC elements.)
It has all been done before and they will continue re-doing it again and again because new ideas are truly rare. I wonder how long it will be before we see an " -- over the internet" or an " -- on a handheld device" versions of these same things.
I really like the Netduino. I find it to be affordable, arduino shield compatible, and write the code with C#.
Has no one heard of the Netduino - it's been out for a quite a while. Arduino-like, and programmed with .NET Micro Framework:
http://netduino.com/
My comments are my own, and do not represent the views of my employer, my spouse, my children, or my cats.
First: MS. Hobbyists, especially the microcontroller crowd, are usually aiming for independence, interconnectivity and freedom of choices. Most microtinkerers I know were even shy to touch the Arduino because it came along with its own development tools that smelled like "you need them to do anything with it". Only after reading the specs, seeing the PCB around the chip and noticing that it is pretty much simply a (rather well designed) pimped out devboard, essentially a "standardized breadboard plus programmer", they started to use it. Many I know still refuse to use the compiler that came with it and stick with AVR Studio or GCC. Some even consider that "too far from the metal" and stick with ASM, personally I think one can overdo his zeal for independence and "feeling your controller", but I'm not judging them. Case in point, microdevs hate being locked into something. Despite the perpetual ATMEL vs PIC battle (and the self-chosen lock-in with either platform, since few people I know really want to work with both).
Second: Microcontrollers are still very, very tiny in their specs. The average affordable model measures their clock in the Megahertz and their flash rom (program memory) in the kilobytes. And for that a .net platform? Are you kidding? Now, I might be prejudiced in this matter, but unless they somhow then turn that .net program into very tight assembler, the 72MHz Arm will feel like a 8MHz Atmel. Now, that Arm implementation MS is offering has 4500kB of flash. Pretty much, considering most AVRs still measure their flash ram in the single and double digit kilobytes. But will that .net compiler spit out native code? Or will a good deal of those 4.5MB be taken up by some virtual machine that then tries to run the object code? Essentially the question is, how much "work" can you push into the flash, how many instructions can you possibly put into it before you're running out of space?
And finally: As a extension from the first point, MC developers love to tinker and toy with their gadgets. And they love expanding on them. Having a wide selection of addons is nice, but how easy is it to roll your own? In case I do not want that Ethernet expansion, can I make my own? Are the specs known? What about the legal shit, can I publish what I create without paying MS for it?
I'd be wary to take the information provided at face value. 72MHz look far more than the measly 20-48MHz Arduino offers (depending on the board you choose). And 4.5MB certainly is far more than 128KB of flash rom. The key question is, though, how much of that rom is usable, how do the processors perform in comparison, and how easy is it to roll your own expansions.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Look at the specs. Arduino's "beefy" MCU is 16 MHz, 8 bits. This is 72 MHz, 32 bits. Arduino draws a sub-10 uA sleep current. This thing draws a 40 mA (yes, milliamp) sleep current. They're completely different devices targeting completely different markets. Talk of "killing" Arduino is just meant to draw eyeballs and clicks.
Gadgeteer seems more like an NXT killer because it is about plugging in modules and writing the software.
Arduino, well, that attracts a different crowd. In some ways, Arduino users seem to be a bit more simplistic. You're limited to one shield (unless you do careful planning), the IDE is very straight forward, etc.. In other ways Aduino users are more sophisticated. It is easier to build a small circuit on a breadboard and connect it to the Arduino with jumper wires. You could do that with the Gadgeteer hardware, but it doesn't look quite as simple so I doubt as many people will do it.
I think that the Windows only bit will limit its use too. Have the people who called the Gadgeteer an Arduino killer really looked at the Arduino userbaseà Lots of Windows users, sure. Tonnes of artists and geeks who use Mac or Linux too.
I wont say this will kill anything, but it sounds fun. I'm betting this works with kinect soon.
Good call.
Kinect Services for RDS provides sample services that use the Kinect for Windows SDK to allow access to the Depth and RGB data from a Kinect sensor. In addition to a service for a real Kinect, there is also a service for a simulated Kinect that works with the RDS simulator. A sample application is included that shows how to use a Kinect on a simulated robot to wander around and avoid obstacles.
Kinect Services for RDS 2008 R3
I'm, I guess, what you'd call a professional arduino programmer. been working exclusively for the past 2 years or so on a combo hardware/firmware project. I did the hardware design, proto testing and driver+apps coding.
and so, I'm pretty familiar with hardware and operational costs of getting arduinos up and running from scratch (we did our own board called the LCDuino-1). when I look at the stuff mentioned in the article, I see more zeroes behind non-zeros than should be there. just too expensive for an 'arduino killer' platform or system.
I'm not against this *because* its MS; and I'm willing to consider other alternatives, but this does not at all look cost effective, just from the pure cost of boards and parts and cables POV.
otoh, the ARM systems (so-called 'plug computers' from marvell) are the next open-source and viable step up from arduino-land. those seagate dockstars and pogoplugs are common examples of those (and nice and hackable, too). with those, you get a full debian linux stack in there; not some mickeymouse 'other thing' inside that you now have to learn and deal with (and debug).
for me, its arduino for the extreme low end; and small/tiny/fanless linux boxes for the "$50 and up" kind of range. they even mix well; if you need a tcp/ip presence, use one of those dockstars and have full ip-tables and all that neat protective stuff there; then have a serial link to the arduino for when it needs to report 'back up'. great way to add remote web control safely to the arduino realtime systems.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Finally---verifiable proof that parallel universes exist! I'm particularly impressed by the remark about Linux conferences. Oh and did you go to this years Sundance Festival? I think there was a film about you!!
>Graphic designers have turned it into an absolutely unusable pile of shit recently. By default, the menu bar and status bar are now gone.
Right Click -> Customize -> Menu bar.
Seriously, that's what you are complaining about? And what are you missing the status bar for? Links still show up when you hover, they just go away when you aren't.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Does it work from linux?
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
16MB - sure, but .NET isn't the most compact code in the world. Nor is the framework - even the "compact" framework sucks up several megs.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
I like having VBA macros bound simply to keys in all worksheets. Also everything on the ribbon is now bound to a key, and just about anything can be bound to an alt+# combo.
really, I spent a fair amount of time filling out todays date on 3 or 4 workbooks per "project". now i have a macro that does that with 2 key presses.
Sorry, the ribbon and vba are the things keeping me hooked on excel.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
14 .NET Gadgeteer compatible sockets
And how about compatibility to something I dream up? Can I attach whatever I wish to it, and still continue to develop in that comfy .net environment?
Arduino's main appeal to the microcontroller hobbyist crowd is that it offers simple access to AVRs without limiting you. Meaning, you basically get an environment that lets you use the microcontroller as if you didn't have it embedded in the Arduino platform if you so desire, but allows you to use it if you so please. How does Gadgeteer fare in comparison?
What microcontroller is it, anyway? I can't find that information. It's an ARM7 CPU, ok, but is it a microcontroller at all? Or just the CPU and some MS-invented design around it?
I might be extra wary when something has an MS label attached, but let me reiterate that: Arduino's appeal stems for no small reason from its openness. It's, in its bare bone, only a PCB that exposes the AVRs pins in a standardized layout. Nothing more, nothing less. You can, when you're fed up with the training wheels that their development environment is, simply hack them off and use it as a simple AVR with a PCB around that exposes the pins in a standardized layout. The crucial question is: Can you do the same with Gadgeteer?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So, I guess then being from Microsoft, it will be just like Arduino in that all the software *and* all the hardware designs are open source, so anybody can make and sell the hardware if they feel like it. Right? And people can take the hardware designs and modify them to make special purpose version, and be able to release updates to the software tool chain to support the new hardware?
Somehow, this just doesn't pass the giggle test.
That's three clicks too many just to make the fucking menu bar re-appear. It should never have been hidden in the first place. The Firefox "UI designers" fucked that one up big time.
You understand that this is three clicks in the course of forever right?
Your complaint is not "They don't give me a choice how to display the window" but merely "My choice isn't even the default choice!".
I went to a BSD conference and didn't see either one. Those stupid geeks were even running open source BSD on laptops with wireless and multimedia; anyone with proper upbringing knows you don't do that! I suppose the 30 million GNU/Linux users haven't bought their macs yet, but soon will. And experts predict IOS will dominate the mobile market, right? Oh no wait, it's to be two-thirds Linux by 2013
So it's real FOSS. Cool. No matter how much corporate MS sucks, MS Research is usually great and their use of AL2 instead of some "Shared Source" license makes Gadgeteer fully Free. One could even port it away from .NET and MS could do nothing about it. AL2 even includes a royalty-free patent license.
Where's a good repository of GPL source code for PIC MCUs? PIC16F, PIC18F, PIC24F?
--
make install -not war
Micro Framework's footprint is around 300KB.
And with all the 10 pin ribbon connections and little in the way of direct bus access, it's a different level of hardware.
And using .NET, who cares? But 4.5Mb of flash! Woot woot! Don't get blinded by looking at the flash.
A little pricey? From TFA:
$15 just for an LED!?
Also it has so many ribbon cables, it looks like *%^$^! Cthulhu.
Why do they use that many wires for each add-on? It's just ridiculous to use a ribbon cable for some of those things, let alone several just for an LCD.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
For those prices, why wouldn't I just get a gumstix and run Mono on it? The gumstix boards also host ARM CPUs that are clocked 10x faster.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Yeh, it's an "arduino killer", why else would it have been made?
Stop playing fucking semantics to ignore the truth of the situation.
It's an overpriced "arduino killer" for people who've drunk the .net koolaid.
http://www.ghielectronics.com/catalog/category/265/
$3 for the cheapest ribbon cable, something you can pick up from a decent part store for 50c. Rip off.
TL;DR: "You kids get off my lawn"
May apologies, but you are on the wrong side of history. In the 50's, there were "old guard" programmers who wanted to program in octal instead of assembly so they could really understand what the computer was doing. In the 60's, the "old guard" fought COBOL and FORTRAN in favor of assembly so "they could understand what the computer was doing". In then 70's, they fought virtual memory because "only with real memory could you understand what the computer was doing". In the 80's, they fought SQL and wanted to keep COBOL so "they could understand what the computer was really doing". In the 90's they fought GUIs because "only with a command line could you really understand what the computer was doing". And in the last decade, they fought bytecode and interpreted languages because "only with a compiled language can you really understand what the computer is doing".
This is not to say that every proposed new language and concept is good -- they aren't. There was an research computer where the compiler was in hardware (yes, individual gates and thing to parse your source code), along with the entire OS. There have been visual languages by the dozen; almost all were losers.
But, overall, history isn't on your side. The higher level languages and abstractions actual make people more productive programmers. Both Java and .NET have been accepted as "good" by an enormous number of working programmers and their hard-nosed managers; they are here to stay.
Want a sig like mine? Join ACM's SigSig today!
"LED module ($15)"
fuck off
They use a common port connection, so that you can use any cable to talk to any board. Sometimes it's overkill - sometimes it's not. But it simplifies connectivity with a common connector.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Firefox is a superb example of this. Graphic designers have turned it into an absolutely unusable pile of shit recently. By default, the menu bar and status bar are now gone. That makes it a royal pain in the ass to access much of its basic functionality!
It also breaks the standard window manager functionality of double-clicking the top left corner to close an app. I've been able to do that for 25+ years now, cross-platform, until Firefox broke it.
I can only presume that the Firefox devs are now of a younger generation that doesn't even know about cross-platform standard GUI functions, nor why they're there.
Can I have their iPod killer though
Ask Ballmer to squirt one over you.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
If there is a part store conveniently located near you, then by all means go there. Most people no longer have that luxury, and are at the wits of the free market.
Your Mom goes to Linux conferences!
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
This sounds like it is practically lego like. If you get light, motion, temperature, humidity, pressure, gps, accerometers, gyros, magnetometers and motor/gyro controllers for this thing, you'll hit almost the entire robotics, weather station hobbyist market. That's a fairly substantial market and would make it worthwhile.
However, I'm an arduino hobbyist primarily because I can open a catalog from some place like digikey and be able to write code to interface with just about anything in there.
Yeah, if you aren't a hardware guy, you might want someone to have already figured out what capacitors, resistors, transistors, diodes you might need to interface with a sensor or whatnot and what the specs of those components should be. The prepackaged modules fit the bill for that is much the same way as an arduino shield.
If you aren't a low level software guy you might be a bit overwhelmed when reading specs full of timing information and not want to deal with it. But there's definitely a place for a simple low-level microcontroller platform that actually lets you get to the bare metal and this .NET Gadgeteer isn't it.
But technologically it was better than what Apple was doing at the time.
When the Zune first came out, it was better than the iPod Classic but fell behind as soon as the Touch was released. It could have been much better had the squirting feature not been so crippled. What put the Touch ahead was that the Touch could function somewhat as a portable computer with browsing, email, and later apps (within a year). The Zune didn't have apps until 3 years and 3 generations later and even then it was pretty much an afterthought. The Touch by then had an ecosystem of tens of thousands of apps whereas the Zune was just a media player.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Uh, no. GHI Electronics has been the company manufacturing Fez boards since early 2010, and they're still doing it now.
Microsoft hasn't "rewritten history" anywhere. The older Fez boards were just Arduino-like proto boards that ran the .NET Micro Framework. The Gadgeteer project is different (of Microsoft Research's specification and GHI's hardware), with the unified interface for all the components. That is what Microsoft did in fact create.
Microsoft isn't lying to anyone. Take off the tinfoil hat.
You could run Mono on a *new* iPod Touch for the same price as just the combination of the whimpy CPU and display modules. And if you do, you'll get wifi, accelerometer, bluetooth, camera, video, Flash, battery, audio i/o, and a few switches thrown in for free. I don't understand the target market here, unless it's people who want to feel like they are low-level breadboarding gods because they plugged a ribbon cable into something and compiled some C# on it.
Over the last 10 years the only products Microsoft has succeeded in killing are it's own
I'd rather have one of these: http://www.mbed.org/ I've been using these for personal projects and various tasks at work, and they've been a dream to work with, especially coming from the world of closed-source, proprietary PIC microcontrollers and the expensive compilers they require to get a decent high-level language working.
Its a totally different audience anyway, it is like how I was arguing with someone who said tablets were "laptop and netbook killers" and I pointed out that is as stupid as saying this new compact is gonna put trucks out of business. One is for consuming content, the other for work.
And with TFA the Arduino is the ultimate DIY cheapo hacker toy. You can do nearly anything with that little sucker and if you can think of it somebody has probably already written the code for it. The device in TFA would be more of a fit for my local college, where they have plenty of programmers well fluent in Visual Studio and a rocketry and robotics dept. With something like TFA they could get the VS guys to write code for the R&R guys and cut down on the time it takes to make a prototype which would allow them to get more done in a semester.
so one is DIY, the other more SMB and college projects. Two different groups with different needs so there are different solutions. I just love how everything nowadays has to be an "X killer" instead of just a new product. Meh, whatever it takes to drive page views i guess. I'd rather read about this than something from the Linux troll Nichols on the WinTroll Thurott any day of the week. At least TFA is keeping the BS down to a manageable level.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Meh, for $120 this thing is probably in trouble anyways. Though that's a shame, more stuff is always better.
.net koolaid". The Netduino has been around for a long time. And it's $35.
And lets remember, there's already an arduino for "people who've drunk the
http://netduino.com/ http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10107
This is a product that they will be able to order from right out of the catalog, and at better prices than people are talking about here.
There are certainly many cheaper products out there (my favorite right now is the 'ET-STM32 Stamp') but if I was looking to build up an embedded computing curriculum for a school, these gadgets are well worth a look.
No.
Going by above statements, you probably don't know anything about the Arduino except the the name. The Arduino is a simple cheap and very limited 8-bit micro-controller, where important part is the limited costs (below $30 to get started) an easy way to hook it up to the computer and a moderately useful development environment where even hobbyists can switch things easily. The big limitations of the Arduino is very little RAM and very little processing power.
This platform by Microsoft doesn't even play in the same league as the Arduino. It costs 5 times as much and can do many things the Arduino even can't dream about, things like handling audio or video data. This product should be seen more as a contender against the small ARM platforms, Propeller and similar. And then, it's similar priced than those.
Will it succeed? I hope so.
Will it push out the Propeller or some ARM products? Perhaps
Will it push out the Arduino? Definitively not.
If there isn't a cool parts store near you, then you order from Digikey or Mouser if you want industrial-style supply catalogs, or Sparkfun or Adafruit if you want friendly hobbyist stuff. Or you can go to a less cool Radio Shack, who don't carry most of the fancy stuff (though they're about to start carrying Arduino) but are good for basic ICs, LEDs, resistors, capacitors, breadboards, and soldering irons.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Seeed Studios makes Grove System, a connectorized bunch of input and output parts that plug in to an Arduino shield, and also sells Arduinos, Netduinos, Zigbee things, and *duino clones. Grove is $39 for the basic set of ~10 things (and has various extra frobs available.) (And realistically, you'll still want to get a breadboard and bag of assorted LEDs and some resistors.) They previously made a similar system called Electronic Brick, which is a 3-wire interface; Grove is 4-wire so it can support either I2C or analog.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yep. For less then the price of the main board of those I can get something like the Sparkfun Inventors kit which is the sort of thing everybody should have.
If building little arcade machines like in the article is your thing then you can get (eg.) Arduino+Gameguino (again for less than the price of *just* their main board).
comes with classes that let you use the modules without having to go 'low level.'
Um, so does Arduino. Using a servo (or whatever) is two lines of code.
Arduino killer? Maybe for .Net hipsters with over-rich parents...
No sig today...
The big limitations of the Arduino is very little RAM and very little processing power.
There's bigger Arduinos available. There's even ARM boards which are compatible with Arduino shields, etc.
If the low-powered Arduinos are so popular it's probably because people figured out you don't need much RAM or processing power to do what people are using them for.
No sig today...
is one way to go to plain AVR devices. I like plain AVR C programming. you can get a simple MCU for $2/piece, so its realistic even for things where you need 10s of MCUs (or where the MCU is most likely lost).
From http://www.ghielectronics.com/catalog/product/269
Active power consumption 160 mA
Idle power consumption 120 mA
Hibernate power consumption 40 mA
Not bad but a bit high if you want it to be battery powered.
Yes, they have twice as much RAM and the same processing speed. The Ardiuno Mega are the way to go if you run out of I/O ports. If you run out of processing power or memory as you do if you want to process audio or video data, do any but the most basic networking, the whole Arduino platform is the wrong solution to your problem. You need something bigger, like a solution based on an ARM processor or the Microsoft gimmick.
The're also the NetDuino which is pin-compatible and can be programmed in C# and the .net environment. The pin-compatibility with Arduino-shields isn't that much of an advantage. It's just a bunch of TTL signals going from the processor directly to the pin on the connector. With only few wires and no other components, those shields can be connected to most other platforms. And many of the really interesting things come as break-out boards, where you need the wires anyway.
Exactly. The Arduino is competing with the PIC and the small TI processors. Compared to those, getting stared and having first successes is far easier and the Arduino community provides lot of support for beginners.. Just plunk down $30, download and the software, connect te board with a vanilla USB cable and try the hello world blinking program.
The Microsoft thing doesn't play in that niche. It's more for small web-appliances, goofing around with audio or video displays or autonomous robotics that need more processing power than the Arduino can provide. And for those applications, it could become a success if the whole solution provides enough benefits for the costs and Microsoft manages to get the community going. Both things that Microsoft hasn't been very good at in the past, but they might get it right this time.
From the image of the breakout-board, they seem to mostly use standard ports which makes adding your own beak-out modules cheap and easy.
Why not ladder logic like the rest of the industry uses for PLC's? (arduino excepted and even then, it SHOULD be using that instead.)
Stupid is as stupid dies.
The purpose of DIY is doing it yourself.
The whole description of this .net gageteer thing is
That's typical of the cognitive dissonance that Microsoft's marketing department displays about anything real world.
(No, I don't count business management IT as real world. But it is as close as Microsoft seems to be able to get to the real world.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
With Microsoft's device, you have to buy certain modules to do X work. You can't just take 3 LEDs, a Servo and make something. Only their modules will fit, and only their modules have software that is compatible with them. This is the same market that Phidget was going after -- you don't need to be an EE or know how to solder to make something.
If you go to the company's website and actually look at the board and the better photos on the starter kit entry, you'll note that the cables are all standard 10-pin ribbons. In other words, the same kind of cables that are used for connecting serial ports to motherboards, but without removing one of the wires from the ribbon.
If something more Arduino-like is what you want, look at their Fez Panda-II. It's $39.95 and has Arduino-compatible headers.
Both boards are built around a 72 MHz ARM7 that just happens to have Microsoft's .Net runtime preinstalled. Don't want to use .Net? Rather develop for the bare metal? That's what the JTAG port is for.
I think this sort of thing could find a lot of use in school programs, whether robotics, engineering or programming courses. Schools would like the MS part and being able to use a "high level" language would make it popular to supplement some programming courses. MS would certainly cut deals on price to get the schools involved.
While all of us here know that it's really simple to program an arduino, or propeller, or for that matter a pic with assembler, I think schools will be able to more easily justify an expense if MS is behind it along with a .net api. While I would prefer them to take a different approach, anything that will get kids into tinkering with home made projects is a very very good thing.
I have a fair amount of experience with assembler and some limited c programming on microcontrollers (mostly pic, but some propeller), but I sometimes wish I could just knock off a quick proof of concept with an easy language and a board with enough power & memory that I don't have to worry too much about how I do things. I'd likely never do that for a real project, but in the end the most important/expensive thing is my time.
If a tool is appropriate for a particular job, I don't think you should lose sleep over whose name is on the box. This is the main reason I rely mostly on open source solutions, and also why I sometimes use closed, propriety ones.
"No Linux? So what's the point about it being open-source then?"
So you can port it perhaps?
You know, open-source doesn't mean "has to run on Linux", it just means the source has to be open, and, er, it is.
The whole philosophy of open source doesn't even revolve around "must run on Linux", it revolves around the ability to view the source for educational purposes, and to be able to take it to modify it, or produce something different.
Why should they make it support Mono? It's open source, you can do that yourself! That's the point!
The advantage of the Arduino (And all the other small microprocessors like the attiny,atmega, pic etc) is that you can play with simple circuits using a breadboard and then even at hobby level create a standalone pcb to make various projects (Just search instructables, hack a day, google for atmega,attiny,pic etc) . Looking at the back of this "Arduino Killer" shows that this is not going compete unless you have some fairly serious hardware to create double sided PCB's and be able to mount BGA chips and be able to source the chips for $2-3 a time. (looking through the linked site I can't even see if you can buy the main processor standalone, the cheapest board the FEZ Mini is $39 a pop, and seems to get a button / LDR component confused?!) This is just a toy, for creating one project at a time, that does have some nice,but hellish expensive, modules to plug into it and nothing more.
That sounds great compared to $30ish for an Arduino compatible USB host. That is until you see that the main board is 4 times the Arduino price.
And lets remember, there's already an arduino for "people who've drunk the .net koolaid".
And if you've drunk the "netduino koolaid", you might as well go whole-hog and get a FEZ (from GHI, the same company producing the first Gadgeteer hardware, coincidentally), which is a more-capable netduino for about the same price.
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Arduino killer? Maybe for .Net hipsters with over-rich parents...
No, not for .net hipsters, just for hyperbole-loving bloggers. Remember, for only $5 more than an Arduino UNO you can get a FEZ Panda. The ".net micro framework" has been around for several years (it was originally known as SPOT). Remember the Fossil smart watch? That's where this all started out.
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You need something bigger, like a solution based on an ARM processor or the Microsoft gimmick.
Gadgeteer IS an ARM platform. Did you think Microsoft created their own microcontroller from scratch?
The're also the NetDuino which is pin-compatible and can be programmed in C# and the .net environment.
There's also the FEZ line of products from the same mfr as the current Gadgeteer hardware, as well as the more-capable EMX and even more-capable Chipworkx platforms.
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What microcontroller is it, anyway? I can't find that information. It's an ARM7 CPU, ok, but is it a microcontroller at all? Or just the CPU and some MS-invented design around it?
It's an NXP LPC23xx microcontroller, I'm guessing. GHI is building the hardware (among others, probably), and the hardware is based on a previous design of GHI's, I believe. The software is the .NET Micro Framework, which is Apache licensed.
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Not so much an arduino killer as a BugLabs competitor. Lets gloss, more bare boards.
http://www.buglabs.net/
Maybe even a nerdkit++
http://www.nerdkits.com/kits/
I think they are wishing for their hay day back. Hay day being, back when people were building their own machines and Microsoft was significant.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Since when can't you double-click the upper-left corner to close FF? Works fine on FF5 for me.
Try doing the same on a PC running a general-purpose OS. Just because you don't like to work on that level doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it. You just hate MS because you think it's cool to hate. It's not. Go away and die.
$120 for something that includes all sorts of stuff that I might not need is hardly a good deal.
Maybe not, but then presumably you wouldn't be buying it if you didn't need it. However, there are some applications in which this would be a better choice than an Arduino, due to the increased memory and power.
All this "object oriented" crap is just an abstraction that helps people
Which is why it's popular. The name of the game is getting shit done, and if something abstracts something in a way that makes things easier, then it's a good thing.
No Linux? So what's the point about it being open-source then?
Why should Microsoft need to support it's dev tools on other platforms? The stuff that makes up the board, and makes up the framework are open source.
> Some plugins would even show additional information there, like the fact that certain content was blocked, or that the page doesn't contain valid HTML.
Yeah, like Noscript, Greasemonkey, and Firebug, all of which are still running up next to my URL bar. Now the messages only show up when there is something to show, instead of eating up a line that usually shows nothing.
Seriously, it sounds like you are looking for something to complain about. Or trolling.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Bingo. "The name of the game is getting shit done." I could not have said that better myself.
This fact of life is a true thorn in the side of the "open or nothing" mentality, and I'm glad I'm finally seeing it on Slashdot.
sidenote: the UIDs on this page are crazy high... the lower numbered old-hats like myself usually (irrationally) hate anything non-open on habit alone.
You can only do that if you have chosen to view the menu bar in the view options. If you hide the menu bar (which is the default), you can't, because a click will then open the menu, and the second click close it. For FF3 it still worked, with FF 4, it didn't, and with FF 5, the non-working behaviour became standard.
I originally bought their Inventors Kit to get me up and running. The thing was amazingly well put-together, with the color get-to-doing-stuff booklet, some fun sensors and such.
I guess I'm treading dangerously close to promotion here, but I'm not affiliated (I swear!). I just have to second that as a really good option for people that want to get started.
Corrections duly noted. Thanks for the info.
I was actually quite surprised. I started playing with Arduinos a year or so ago, and found that all of my local Radio Shacks have a section about 6 feet wide, 10 drawers high, with actual electronic components in them, as well as soldering stuff and a variable amount of other electronics on the wall (typically a couple of PIC or Basic Stamp sets.) Half of them are various audio connectors, and half of what's left are collections (Bag O' Resistors, Bag O' LEDs, etc.), but it's still been really useful. They don't have AVR microcontrollers, but they've got 555 timers and a couple kinds of op-amps, and they've got lots of different LEDs. And yeah, you'll pay a lot more than if you ordered them online, but there's no shipping cost and they're right there on your way home from work. (On the other hand, if you want a USB cable, they've only got $25 ones, not $2 ones.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks