I am looking at buying a NetDuino for some fun home hobby projects.
Have any of you used it and how was your experience?
Should i look at the Arduino or FreeDuino range instead(or something totally different)?
I decided to stick to the NetDuino due to my C# knowledge, but that is not a requirement.
Thanks
PS. I am not sure if this belongs to the community wiki or not (guidance appreciated).
I love C# and find the productivity benefits of developing in C# with Visual Studio to be a very strong factor in favor of the Netduino. I would not pooh-pooh Netduino because "C# isn't for microcontroller/embedded environments" as other answers here indicate.
You can make great fun projects and learn a lot about connecting different physical inputs and output devices using Netduino just as you can with Arduino or going "bare metal" and doing the direct MCU management of the AVR, PIC, or other microcontrollers.
With that said I am sticking with Arduino for the following reasons:
So I would say if your C skills are dusty or nonexistant, you love C# and Visual Studio, and just want to tinker on a few hobby projects that won't need to scale out to where cost becomes a bigger issue, go Netduino.
If you are comfortable in C, or comfortable in getting by in it with the help of code samples and the community, and want to be closer to the metal and look at eventually getting away from the "prototype" approach of Netduino and Arduino, go Arduino to get started.
Your C# knowledge is close to useless on an embedded platform anyway, so don't put too much weight on that.
I'd go with an Arduino or one of the clones, not because .Net is the devil, but because that's what everybody else is using, so you will have a much easier time getting help and mooching off of people's code.
Once you have gotten your feet wet, by all means branch out and try different stuff.
I currently have an Arduino, mbed, and finally, a Netduino at my disposal for development / hobbyist use. I never liked working with the Arduino, perhaps because the editor is not very good, and I'm definitely spoiled as a C# developer. When I received my mbed, I liked development on that much, much better, but debugging is still painful because you have to use print statements to figure out what's going on.
When you're developing a product, or just screwing around, a vast majority of your time at first is spent debugging... and when you are debugging, you want to have breakpoints. I have a very difficult time going back to embedded hardware that doesn't offer any sort of breakpoints.
I don't have experience with JTAG yet, but every micro I've seen up until now (besides the RabbitCore modules) requires it to allow debugging via breakpoints. Imagine my surprise when I hooked up my Netduino today and was able to single step through my code in VS2010! I was extremely pleased by this.
Personally, I would not worry about the footprint size, evils of .NET and Microsoft, etc. etc. I would only care about being able to debug quickly and efficiently, so I can just get stuff done.
As a BasicStamp user for almost 20 years and a NetDuino user for only 2 weeks (I've never used a Arduino), I'd say that the NetDuino is a great platform. The two main features that I am enjoying: ease of programming (and breakpoints!) in VisualStudio and the hi-resolution ADC on the board are key reasons. The few Arduino shields that I have tried from SparkFun have worked perfectly with the NetDuino.
Personally, I'm not a fan of C# or .NET. I'm a C luddite. So, my choice of platform comes down to which has the hardware features I want (flash, RAM, clock speed, number of ADCs, number of timers, etc).
That said, I can imagine C#/.NET being useful for rapid prototyping:
Of course, this all comes at a cost:
And, most of all, by using your C# skills on an embedded platform you're not really learning anything about embedded devices.
Yes, it'll get the job done - but, where's the fun in that?
I found the mbed to be a marvellous substitute for the Arduino.
The software library is more C++ oriented, complete with all the syntactic sugar of assignment operator overloading. Additionally, a system is set up such that users can publish and document code libraries, which can then easily be searched and imported into projects.
Another good feature is the ability to treat the device as a USB stick, and just put the .bin files straight onto the drive.
Unfortunately, the IDE is comparable to that of the arduino. Also, it's online. This is both really good (can be used on any PC, no installation required), and really bad (can't easily be reprogrammed without an internet connection).
The cost of the board is $60, but they have a sponsorship scheme, where they will donate boards to interesting projects provided progress is documented and source code made public.
I'm primarily a C# developer. I bought an Arduino instead of a Netduino because of the availability of source code. It wouldn't be easy to integrate Netduino with Arduino electronic bricks because you'll have to rewrite some of the samples from scratch.
When reading 'C# isn't suitable for embedded platforms', remember that people older than a certain age have already heard that said at least once about 'C' and then again about C++ in their lifetimes...
Of course it's monumentally 'wasteful' of the underlying capabilities of the processor, but the ability to run your idle loop 1000x faster than you need rather than 10x faster than you need never made anyone rich.
If you want to feel the bare metal and for example be able to generate or capture video signal directly, that's where every cycle matters and AVR/Arduino will let you do that. If you want higher level of abstraction, higher level programming and debugging comfort, garbage collector and can live with the fact that like in Windows you don't control everything, then choose NetDuino or FEZ Domino. Since both have ARM in their hearth, I bet that if needed you can kill .NET MF on the board and flash bare metal ARM GCC code directly from some Eclipse like IDE with help of a small JTAG debugger. Investigate a little. The problem might be that if JTAG header is missing, you'll need to do some soldering.
After a very long hiatus from electronics and programming, I've gotten back into it because of a project one of my sons is doing at university. I learned electronics when tubes were the norm and programming with toggle switches (set address, set data, load, store, in binary) and punch cards. Over the years, I've learned and used each electronic and programming language advancement which took a lot of concentrated effort and time. Consequently, I am so grateful for the advancements in microcontrollers and how incredibly cheap they are, including the development boards such as the Arduino, Netduino, etc. The arguments about Arduino vs Netduino, etc., remind me of the Microsoft vs Apple battles such as command line vs GUI. It doesn't matter which platform, programmiing language, etc., is used as long as it is appropriate to the result.
If .net MF gave libraries that are capable of what pure machine / metal code can do, ...then the only abstraction ( . Net MF) becomes a good one. Apart from taking more footprint and running a GC ( which should make it efficient ?? )