Bruce Eitman, long time Windows Embedded guru, joined Embedded101 as one of the member of the board to help guide and expand our community.

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"Microsoft has finally joined the mini PC craze, introducing a Windows-compatible development board dubbed Sharks Cove."

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I recently needed to create and format a disk partition from a batch file.  To make this more fun, I needed to run the batch file from a USB disk which mounted as the D drive, but I needed the new partition to be the D drive when finished. in the interest of full disclosure, there are other ways to do this, but I wanted to do it from a batch file because I was doing other things from batch files at the time – so this method fit in. I started this by doing running diskpart and learning what could do and how to do it.  To start I knew that I needed to create disk 0 partition 2 and format it with NTFS.  The commands in diskpart are: select disk 0 create partition primary noerr select part 2 format fs=ntfs label=Data quick These command create and partition disk 0 partition 2 and format the disk.  But what I found is that the USB disk was the D drive and the new partition was the F driver, not what I want.   But if before creating the partition, I ch ...

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I was installing a driver over and over, and thought that there must be a better way than going to the device manager.  Well, it turns out that there is.

The plug and play utility (pnputil.exe) is designed for this purpose.   The following installs from an INF named mydriver.inf.

pnputil.exe -i -a "c:\OEM\mydrive.inf"

Which I included in the following batch file, which copies the driver to a folder on the C drive, installs the driver, then reboots if the user agrees.

@echo off

xcopy /s /e /q /Y /I OEM c:\OEM

pnputil.exe -i -a "c:\OEM\mydrive.inf"

echo.
echo.
echo A reboot is necessary for these changes to take effect.
echo.
set /p input= "Reboot Now (Y/N)?"

echo %input%
IF "%input%"=="y" goto :REBOOT
IF "%input%"=="Y" goto :REBOOT
goto :EOF

:REBOOT
shutdown /r /t 0

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    Yesterday, I got my kit with the Intel Galileo board with "Windows for IoT" and of course, as a child who has a new toy in his hands, I started to play ! The easiest thing is to follow the online documentation, accessible from the official Windows On Devices website, which describes step by step how to be "up and running" in a few minutes. My desire to do drove me to make a "mistake" that didn’t allow me to finish the procedure correctly. What happened ? After turning on the Galileo, connecting it to the PC and browsing through the folders (both with a telnet session as "network shared"), I decided to develop the first example for the blinking LED. I opened Visual Studio 2013, selected the C++ project template for Windows for IoT, and finallty started the build without any changes but  .... here was the error ! Arduino.h file not found ? How it is possible ?  Isn’t it installed with the SDK that we have to download from the Microsoft Connect site ? No, it isn&rsqu ...

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  The next release of the community beaglebone BSP gets a Windows Embedded Compact 2013 image along with an Internet of Things (IoT) sample code using the M2MQTT library. The WEC2013 demo image on Codeplex now includes the M2MQTT client library built in. To show a real world IoT working example I have included a Visual Studio 2013 sample project. The Internet of Things has been getting a lot of press lately, but at its core it just remote communication with a network enabled device. Something we in the embedded world have been doing for years. It seems the marketing people just love to invent new terms for the same old things (SoT). I say this tongue-in-cheek of course, IoT can be much more and I am sure we will be hearing more in the months and years to come. So to use the sample do the following: Download the WEC2013 beaglebone release. Prepare the uSD card (see documentation on the Codeplex site) Make sure the WEC2013 Application Builder plugin is installed on your Visual Studio 2013 ho ...

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    This time the M2Mqtt library has undergone some "important" changes in terms of new features and bug fixing. I have to admit that the improvements are mainly due to the people who use it and report me to add new features or bugs to fix. In addition to several issues reported on CodePlex, this time also Clemens Vasters, PM on Microsoft Azure, submitted some improvements to be applied in the context of SSL / TLS authentication. In fact, as already tweeted several weeks ago, Clemens used my library to run tests on the Reykjavik project (Device Gateway) presented at Build in 2014 and I can only be honored. SSL/TLS authentication In this case, the improvement is closely related to the .Net Framework version, since it is the only version to support what has been added. In particular, the MqttClient class makes available other constructors which can provide the following callbacks : RemoteCertificateValidationCallback : allows the user to execute further checks on the validation of the ...

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  As stated in my last post eMMC memory devices are quickly replacing native NAND memory on embedded devices. This can not happen soon enough in my opinion. If anyone has worked with native NAND and tried to get these working knows exactly what I am talking about. The BeagleBone Black utilizes a 2Gb eMMC memory part for local, on board, bulk non-volatile storage. On later rev C boards the part was upgraded to 4Gb with no change in the footprint. To fully support eMMC on the community BSP several modifications had to be made. Several drivers (SDHC, SDMEMORY and FATFS) had to be modified as well as the boot code. Support for sector mode addressing (eMMC parts greater than 2Gb) was also added. The sdmemory driver needed some tweaks but for the most part the sdmemory library included with WEC2013 and WEC7 works as-is. This library handles the commands issued to the SD/SDHC/MMC/eMMC device and is also responsible for detecting which flavor of device is connected, among other tasks. The SDHC also needed m ...

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Although it was announced immediately after the Build 2014 and O'Reilly Solid , the "Windows Developer Program for IoT" was officially started yesterday !

The announcement was made by the program manager, Steve Teixeira, on the Windows blog highlighting the launch of the new Windows Developer for IoT portal and the beginning of the shipping of the evaluation kit consisting of the Intel Galileo board with a specific version of Windows that supports the Arduino APIs and a subset of the Win32 API.

Also, on the Microsoft Open Technologies website it is specified that the SDK will soon be released in part as open source.

For those who were already enrolled in the program, they have to wait for the kit that will arrive at home very soon but can start to take a tour on the new portal that already provides all the information related to SDK with the sample applications !

    After I wrote the article about the Node-RED installation with a Web Site in Microsoft Azure, I decided to start another "small" open source project closely related to the "flow-based programming" with Node-RED using the Microsoft Azure services. Starting from Azure SDK for Node.js I am asked myself the following question: why not make available to the Node-RED users all the Microsoft Azure services in their "flows" ? From there I had a new project idea : Azure Nodes ! This project, available on GitHub, adds a bunch of nodes ("azure" colored) to the Node-RED toolbox through which you can interact with the Microsoft Azure services. The current version is still in Beta and it supports only the Service Bus features (queue and topic / subscription) very useful in the Internet of Things, I love. The documentation is available in the Wiki pages related to the project even if the use of the nodes is remarkably simple and intuitive. There are still many (too much ?) debug messages displayed ...

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