.NET Gadgeteer — Microsoft's Arduino Killer? 241
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?"
Honest question: (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Honest question: (Score:4, Funny)
I would like to kill fill-in-the-blanks.
Re:Honest question: (Score:5, Funny)
Video killed the radio star.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
> Radio grew 6% this year
Do you mean "radioactivity"?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
A couple of recent ones:
- Compact Discs (both audio and data) - cassettes / zip disks are dead. Took a while, but it got there. Currently being threatened by lossy codecs and USB storage.
- Digital Cameras. Can you still get Polaroid film?
Re: (Score:3)
Guns killed suits of armor.
Tanks beat out horses.
Two seconds of thinking killed your point.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Im going to go make a post on Google+ to my one friend on there about how my 250 friends on facebook are missing out on this wildly popular facebook killer. That is, if he ever logs in again.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It seems no technology ever dies completely, but I think most people would agree the telegraph is pretty much as dead as they come, even if the Internet can be considered a modern form of telegraphy. :)
Re: (Score:2)
Reading comprehension fail.
The question wasn't whether a technology has ever killed another (it has).
The question was whether a marketer calling something a "XXX killer" has ever worked out for anybody.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Not doubting your numbers, but you need more imagination. Because of the lower barrier to entry, those 300k Arduinos will blossom into a much bigger number.
Personal anecdote: where I wouldn't have considered a MC project, previously, I have bought an mbed controller and plan to do some interesting things with it. The ease of making it do fun things - in contrast with "real" MCs - enhances my enthusiasm for this device and will certainly carry over to other associates of mine who see that, "Hey! Lookit wha
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Honest question: (Score:4, Informative)
That's the whole point of the board. It is intended as an Amtel AVR platform for hobbyists to play with. Of course there is no commercial use, because commercial entities would simply fabricate their own system around the AVR microcontroller (and a large number do just this). It's like comparing the BeagleBoard against the use of ARM processors in general.
This product is positioning itself as a microcontroller platform for hobbyists to play with. That puts it firmly in the same market as the Arduino. Again, if commercial users had a need for such a device, they would fabricate their own system based off the ARM7. Now this chip does have the overhead of the .NET runtime environment. On the other hand, it costs 3x as much, has a 32-bit 72MHz ARM, rather than an 8-bit 16MHz AVR, and some 500x the memory. Less of a microcontroller and more of a minicomputer. It's a considerable step up in capability than the Arduino, so while in the same market, it's not a direct competitor.
Re: (Score:2)
Sort of... but not always.
We often buy a bunch of Arduino boards simply because it's simpler/faster/cheaper to use them and plug them in to our daughter boards than to fabricate our own complete solution each time, especially for short runs. Of course, we never actually use them _with_ the Arduino layer, we just use them simply as convenient prepackaged microcontroller modules.
That said, the bulk of our products tend to end up being completely custom solutions purely because of size constraints.
Re: (Score:2)
Yep, and a massive part of this is the fact that it's cheap enough that they can put together kits containing an Arduino with a breadboard and some wires and a book and a whole bunch of electronic components for less than $100 (ie. people can buy Arduino on a whim).
Re: (Score:2)
Point is: The real "killers" are decided by the public, not the marketers or dreamers.
Let me answer that with another question: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The Ribbon interface was a productivity killer, if that counts.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
>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.
Re: (Score:2)
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!".
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
The Kinect was intended as a Wii killer and did quite well, but that was only because of Microsoft embracing the maker community that found brilliant alternative uses for it. In the end it was far more effective when separated from the awful excuse for a console platform it was designed for.
So Iguess the answer is no.
Re: (Score:2)
um.... Investor Dividend Killer? I think most of em had that distinction.
It looks nice.. but it's expensive (compared to Ardunio) and I don't run Windows on anything.
Re: (Score:2)
Windows was an X killer?
Re: (Score:2)
And it sure killed the X... Box.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
a bit of both, most had a dreamcast day one and got rid of it when ps2 went on sale
Re: (Score:2)
Playstation killed the Dreamcast. The Xbox didn't even come out until several months after the Dreamcast had been pulled from the American market.
Re: (Score:2)
The XBox may have killed the Dreamcast and kept Sony in check but they did that at a cost of many billions of dollars obtained from the Windows OS side of the business.
LoB
Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Nope (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Nope (Score:5, Interesting)
The type of person who is a rabid irrational open source zealot and would cut their nose off to spite their face is the same type who will avoid anything with a Microsoft logo.
FTFY.
There's plenty of people out there who are a bit more rational than that though, and just use what they like, and avoid what they don't. The plethora of open source software available on Windows should make that clear enough- clearly if people are developing FOSS for Windows, then not everyone that cares about open source is avoiding everything with a Microsoft logo, clearly some recognise that FOSS and proprietary can actually work together. Obviously you've never heard of XBMC or the FOSS Kinect projects etc. either.
In fact frankly, most people I come across who have this hate Microsoft for everything, forever attitude, aren't even FOSS developers, they're just FOSS fanboys, groupies, whatever you want to call them. They don't actually help the FOSS community really, they just unfairly make it look like it's full of retards because they're the mouthy gobshites making it look bad, whilst the hard working, talented developers slave away creating a decent product, whatever the underlying platform.
Besides, even if you genuinely believe that a single company can kill FOSS, then there's a lot bigger threats than Microsoft nowadays, MS is pretty much done as a threat to FOSS, I'd be more worried about the growing influence of Apple's extremely more closed and restrictive platform model, or the push by equally many other firms for everything to be run from the cloud, where you can use it, but can't fiddle with it.
DIY (Score:2)
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.)
Not a chance. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Requiring Windows is most likely not a problem. All the hassles involved in getting it to work with Windows, that would be the problem.
Thanks but I'll stick with Arduino and leave the nightmare of jumping around Microsoft's landmines in the past.
Re:Not a chance. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I've dealt with .NET Micro Edition.
We should have got the one that ran the Linux kernel and dealt with JTAG programming and all that. We spent person-months discovering just how badly .NET ME actually worked (like, unidirectional communication--from the board only). Supposedly, the newer .NET ME has that fixed... but the board in question can't be upgraded. It's .NET ME 2.5 or Linux.
We could, however, re-flash it to Linux with the debug adapter (which we didn't buy) and a JTAG programmer (which we can fa
prediction (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Nope (Score:3)
Fun way to build on kinect hype (Score:3)
Kinect Services for Microsoft Robotics (Score:2)
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 [microsoft.com]
Re: (Score:2)
I'm betting this works with kinect soon.
It has an Ethernet and a Wifi module. Microsoft recently released a Kinect sdk [microsoft.com] that works with .NET, so you could write the portion of the code that uses Kinect on a PC in the same language that you use on the device and just send the data over TCP.
The likeliest adopters are commercial users (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't love Microsoft, but kudos to them for branching out creatively in an effort to shore up their sagging fortunes.
Microsoft just announced record Q4 earnings a few weeks ago of over $17B. How, by any stretch of the phrase, are their fortunes "sagging"? I wish my own personal fortunes were sagging as badly.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The likeliest adopters are commercial users (Score:4, Insightful)
LoB
Wow! Awesome idea!! (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 t
Heard of the Netduino? (Score:2)
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/ [netduino.com]
No. Just no. For more than one reason. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
The NETMF compiler doesn't output native code, it outputs MSIL and it's interpreted on the device (unlike, for example, the full-blown framework, where everything's JITted). Certainly this comes at a performance cost. You'd need to decide whether the tradeoffs are worth it.
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?
The NETMF footprint is roughly 300KB, and there are NETMF devices with only 512KB of flash. See the FEZ line as well as the Netduino. This device is a MUCH more capable platform than you'd normally see with the NETMF, with gobs and gobs o
Re: (Score:3)
What's this!? Reason AND logic, on SLASHDOT? Far out. I like it.
It's not meant to compete with Arduino (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, the current struck me as unreasonably high too. I even went and checked the datasheet for the processor to make sure I wasn't missing anything. My guess is that they simply figured that this device will always be powered off a wire and didn't bother giving it a particularly robust sleep mode.
Closer to an NXT killer ... (Score:2)
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 Gadgetee
whoa! that looks expensive (Score:3)
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.
So, anyone can me them? (Score:2)
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.
Apache License 2 (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
This uses .NET MF, which is itself FOSS under Apache license, so the entire stack is, in fact, open.
PIC Open Source? (Score:2)
Where's a good repository of GPL source code for PIC MCUs? PIC16F, PIC18F, PIC24F?
Different level of hardware (Score:2)
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.
Pricey, so why not gumstix? (Score:3)
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.
Not to be rude (Score:3)
"LED module ($15)"
fuck off
iPod is cheaper (Score:2)
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.
Killer? (Score:2)
Over the last 10 years the only products Microsoft has succeeded in killing are it's own
Arduino (Score:2)
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).
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
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 thousa
Re: (Score:2)
Can I have their iPod killer though
Ask Ballmer to squirt one over you.
Re:little pricey (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
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/ [ghielectronics.com]
$3 for the cheapest ribbon cable, something you can pick up from a decent part store for 50c. Rip off.
Re: (Score:3)
Conveniently located Parts Stores On Line (Score:2)
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.
Re:little pricey (Score:4, Informative)
And lets remember, there's already an arduino for "people who've drunk the
http://netduino.com/ [netduino.com] http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10107 [sparkfun.com]
Hardware to go with Netduino (Score:3)
Seeed Studios [seeedstudio.com] 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 eith
Re:little pricey (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep. For less then the price of the main board of those I can get something like the Sparkfun Inventors kit [sparkfun.com] 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 [excamera.com] (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...
Re: (Score:3)
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
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Does it work from linux?
Re: (Score:2)
A little pricey? From TFA:
$15 just for an LED!?
Also it has so many ribbon cables, it looks like *%^
Re: (Score:3)
Re:specifications / cost (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re:specifications / cost (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:specifications / cost (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re: (Score:2)
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.