The Netduino

An article by Ramon van Bruggen    2 Comments

If you are into electronics and you are a .NET developer then this thing called the Netduino is something you might find interesting. The Netduino is in the same form factor as it’s smaller (CPU wise) brother the Arduino

Above is the new Arduino Uno

Today I received my Netduino package! A nice blue box.

Inside is the Netduino board.

Ofcourse I couldn’t wait and had already installed the necessary software on my development PC. This consists of:

1 Microsoft Visual C# Express 2010
2 .NET Micro Framework SDK v4.1
3 Netduino SDK v4.1.0 (32-bit) or Netduino SDK v4.1.0 (64-bit)

After that you can fire up isual Studio 2010 and start your first Embedded Microsoft.NET Micro Framework application!

I looked at the getting start guide (pdf) for the Netduino. Inside this document is a small example on how to flash the onboard Netduino LED. I thought that would be a nice start to get started with my new shiny Netduino. The code for flashing a LED is as following:

   1: public static void Main()

   2:         {

   3:             // write your code here

   4:             OutputPort led = new OutputPort(Pins.ONBOARD_LED, false);

   5:             while (true)

   6:             {

   7:                 led.Write(true); // turn on the LED

   8:                 Thread.Sleep(250); // sleep for 250ms

   9:                 led.Write(false); // turn off the LED

  10:                 Thread.Sleep(250); // sleep for 250ms

  11:             }

  12:         }

After typing in this impressive amount of code I pressed the debug button in VS2010 and started praying. After building and deploying the code the LED on the Netduino started blinking!!

My confidence was skyhigh and I was ready for my next challenge lets do something bigger. I had some 32×8 LED Matrices laying around from Sure Electronics. I decided I wanted to try to connect those displays to the netduino using code I had for the arduino. To my surprise a member on the Netduino forums (sweetlilmre) had already translated the C code for driving the Holtek HT1632 chip on the Matrix boards. You can find his post here. I downloaded the code, I connected the wires from the netduino to my Matrix board and….. nothing! I checked my connections, double checked everything seemed to be ok! What could be wrong? My confidence from a few minutes ago was totally gone, I searched and checked but could not find an error. I posted messages to the writer of the driver code on the forum to ask him what I could be doing wrong. After a few posts sweetlilmre suggested I updated my netduino to the latest firmware. I tried and instantly after the upgrade was ready I got something displayed on the matrix!

There is a public beta at the moment for a Netduino Plus board, this board has all the features of the Netduino, but ads a MicroSD and Ethernet to the board! I ordered one immediately!