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Exploring the Netduino #1: Takin’ her for a Test Drive

From the last post on Exploring the Netduino, we learned that the Netduino is a lot like the Arduino Uno in physical and electrical aspects, but the Netduino has a few advantages in its court: ~3 times the processing power, 32-bit ARM7, and nearly 30x the RAM. But it was also noted that the Netduino runs a slimmed down version of the .NET Micro Framework (NETMF) which naturally will require more overhead than the native binaries that are compiled down tightly for the Arduino Uno’s ATmega328 8-bit AVR processor.

If you have a Netduino (or are thinking of getting one) and have not yet tried out (or looked at) the Netduino “Getting Starting” guide, I recommend reading it. It walks the reader through setting up their development environment and then writing a simple “Hello, World” type program which gets the little blue light on the board to blink. Unfortunately, this introduction is quite limited and might leave you saying “Well, blinking a blue light was fun, but what next?” Glad you asked!

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Exploring the Netduino #0: Kickin’ the tires

Every tech head with an interest in PICs and Microcontrollers out there knows about the Arduino phenomenon by now. As described by the Arduino folks themselves:

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

Except for those of us who spend the bulk of our time in a modern “managed” code environment like Microsoft’s .NET — Sure, we all got started on languages like ASM, BASIC, C and C++, but having graduated to these higher level languages like C# and Java, it’s really nice to have a modern, intelligent IDE (like Visual Studio) to work with and not have to worry about things like malloc() and garbage collection.

Enter: the Netduino

The Netduino