For Round two of the Dare To Dream Different Challange I recieved a package from Microsoft. It includes a Device Solutions Tahoe II, two XBee Modules and a USB XBee Development board.
My first experiences with the Tahoe II board where very positive. USB debugging goes very fast and i’m impressed with the overall speed of the board. The board has less memory then the GHI boards I used to develop on. I don’t know what for implications this has.
I haven’t tried the XBee modules yet as I don’t need them in my application. When that’s finished I’ll try them. Together with the Bluetooth Modules I’ve ordered from SparkFun.
I can think of many .NET Micro Framework applications that require text input. Jan Kucera has made a control for this using the up/down and left/right buttons to write text. You can find this control on his .NET Micro Framework Examples page.
With the Touchscreen support of MF 3.0 I tought it would be nice to have something like an on screen keyboard like you find on modern cellular phones. I made a simple KeyboardWindow class. When you create a new KeyBoardWindow an keyboard is displayed on the screen with a flickering cursor. Simply tap on the buttons to add a extra char. Shift is supported.
I made a Visual Studio 2008 Solution that encapsulates and demonstrates the class.
You can download it here: MF_OnScreenKeyBoardDemo.zip
I hope it can be usefull for someone!
I’m very busy building my Dare To Dream Different Challenge project. As this is a contest it’s hard to decide what to publish and what not. For my project I need a fair amount of mathematical functions like Sin, Cos, Tan, Exp, etc. These are not implemented, or in the case of Sin and Cos very inaccurate in .NET Micro Framework.
So I started the search how to calculate those functions. I made a class of it. It’s made to be a drop-in replacement for System.Math. I tried to make it as accurate as the full .NET version.
Currently supported functions:
- double Abs(double x)
- Acos(double x)
- Asin(double x)
- Atan(double x)
- Atan2(double y, double x)
- Ceiling(double x)
- Cos(double x)
- Cosh(double x)
- Exp(double x)
- Pow(double x, double y)
- Floor(double x)
- Log(double x)
- Log(double x, double newBase)
- Log10(double x)
- Max(double x, double y)
- Min(double x, double y)
- Sinh(double x)
- Sign(double x)
- Sin(double x)
- Sqrt(double x)
- Tan(double x)
- Tanh(double x)
- Truncate(double x)
You can download the Classfile here: exMath.cs
Whoohoo! I was positively surprised when the winners of round 1 where announced on the “Dare to Dream Different” challenge website. My name was on the list!
Next step is to start working on a prototype and a video of my idea.. I read trough the rules of the contest and I think I’m allowed to post information and source on my website so you can follow it’s progress!
The complete list of Round 1 Winners are on the “Dare to Dream Different” challenge website:
http://dreamdifferentcontest.com/round1_winners.aspx
Another thing: I like to get in touch with "Henk de Koning" from Veenendaal, the Netherlands.. If you are him, could you leave me a message.. I’m interested in your experice with .NET Micro Framework!
Happy new year! or "Gelukkig nieuwjaar!" as we say in Dutch. With the end of 2008 I want to look back in what was a spectacular year. Somewhere in september I recieved a newsletter from Antratek that promoted a new development system with .NET Micro Framework. It had my interest so I ordered a development system from GHI. As hobbyist I missed a place where you can showcase projects. I told this on the forum of GHI and they build a project page. I want to thank GHI Electronics for this.
I wanted to publish more about .NET Micro Framework, not just projects, so on October 27th I launched this website initialy filled with my projects. The new website takes a lot of time to fill but I have great satisfaction doing it. In just over 2 months I get about 60-80 visits a day with a peak over 100 when I posted an article about DPWS.
My latest project is my .NET Micro Framework Wiki. I installed MediaWiki and made an initial filling. The first users have registered themselfs and 1 visitor already published some content. I want to thank "Daantje" for beeing the first to help me and the community build the.NET Micro Framework Wiki. Keep up the good work! I also want to thank Pavel Bánský for mentioning this blog and the Wiki is his december wrap-up.
In the We-Think world we live in today it is strange that there isn’t something like a Wiki I tought. A Wiki is the ideal way to share information between people. Becouse it takes a huge amount of time to fill it I’m asking everybody to help me write it. At the time of writing this article I setup a basic layout and written pages about GPIO, I2C and SPI..
Everyone is invited to register and start writing pages! I’m working out ideas to put the people in the spotlight that have made contributions. When using the Wiki there are some simple guidelines:
- The Wiki is about sharing information. Keep this in mind when you write your pages and having discussions.
- Be positive! People, including me, do the best they can. This doesn’t say that we don’t make mistakes. You can edit the piece of text that you feel is wrong. Don’t just say that’s wrong. You can show you’re knowlage by sharing it not by pointing out other peoples mistakes.
- When you have you’re own .NET Micro Framework project you are free to make a Wiki page about it but it has to do with the framework. That you can sell very special pills for man and woman or you sell houses very cheap isn’t interesting for this Wiki!
I hope people like the idea and help me, and thus the .NET Micro Framework community!
The address of the Wiki is:
http://wiki.microframework.nl
Jens Kuhner already mentioned it on his weblog. AUG Elektronik is working on a new .NET Micro Framework device. I think it’s a very promissing product so I think it deserves some extra attention.
The development system is based on a 200Mhz(!) Atmel AT91SAM9261 processor and has impressive SDRAM and Flash sizes. AUG Elektronik expects to release the product in the first quarter of next year.
For more information visit the development kit website:
http://aug-electronics.com/Home/tabid/135/Default.aspx
The full specifications are:
* Atmel AT91SAM9261 (200 MHz)
* 160 kB SRAM (internal)
* 64 MB SDRAM
* 256 MB NAND Flash
* 3.4” OLED Display 480×272, 24 BPP RGB
* resistive touch screen (SPI)
* capacitive sensor keypad (16 keys, I2C)
* 4 serial Ports (2 RS-232, 1 RS-485, 1 Debug RS-232)
* 10/100 MBit Ethernet Auto-MDI
* I2C Bus
* SPI Bus
* battery backed realtime-clock (I2C)
* several (15) free GPIOs (more depend on peripherals)
* .NET Micro Framework 3.0
* 110 mm x 65 mm x 28 mm
* 102 g (incl. Ethernet and 3.4” OLED display)
* USB Host (*)
* USB Device (*)
* Micro SD-Card slot (*)
* single 5 V power supply
* PowerOverEthernet PoE power supply (optional)
(*) Not ready yet
When I published my message about implementing DPWS on .NET Micro Framework I had some questions how to make a Client on the Full .NET Framework.
I tried it and had some succes by disassembling the Micro Framwork DPWS implementation with the Refractor tool, modifying some dependencies and fixing some function differences. This is a solution but obvious not the right solution. I’ve send an e-mail to Steve Maillot if I could make my example public. When doing so I would provide a reverse-engineered and modified version of Microsoft libraries and that’s quite logical not allowed.. Not the solution thus..
Next solution is to make our own basic DPWS client, not the most impossible task in the world but Steve ensured me Microsoft is working on a document explaining how to use WCF to connect to a DPWS device, Not with device discovery, that is planned for the 4.0 .NET release.
So stay tuned.. beter to wait a while than make you’re own half baked solution.
Hi,
I was looking for the URL of the great Tiny Font Tool GUI that Jan Kučera wrote when I stumbled upon another utility wich can be very usefull: Micro XAML Tool
As for now I don’t have the time to check it out as I’m busy redesigning my personal website and working on my RGB Led display project.
The URL of the tool is:
informatix.miloush.net/microframework/Utilities.aspx
Great work Jan Kučera!
Thursday I recieved my package from SparkFun with the RGB Led matrixes.. How nice!
I could’t wait to put them together.. So I did 
This are the first results..
I connected all the Matrixes together by a flatcable between the ICSP programming connectors removing the MISO and CS wires. Next I build a simple board with a PCF8574A (An I2C 8-bit I/O Expander) that provides the Chip Select signals for the RGB Matrix boards. (I’ll post a schematic when the project matures).
Next thing to do is update the software in the RGB matrixes. These matrixes all have an Atmel atmega8 controller. I hope I can make the displays PWM compatible so I can make more colors..
Some photo’s from Flickr: (Go to the Flickr page)
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