Again, one of my posts on .NET Micro Framework is leading to Coding4Fun on Channel9 in the periodic Friday post on the projects based on the hardware.

This time it refers to experimental SDKs released by Secret Labs for support .Net Micro Framework, the Netduino board and the AGENT smartwatch in Visual Studio 2013.

As always it makes me happy!

The SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface) bus is a synchronous communication bus typically used to transfer data between a microcontroller and an external device (eg sensor, actuator, memory, SD card, ...). Being synchronous, unlike the typical asynchronous serial communication (UART), it uses a clock signal to ensure the perfect synchronism in the transmission and reception between the two counterparts known as master and slave. Bus description Overall, the SPI bus is characterized by the following signals : SCLK (Serial CLocK) : clock for synchronization in the data exchange; SS (Slave Select) : signal for enabling the slave (receiver); MOSI (MasterOut / SlaveIn) : data line used for the transmission from master to slave; MISO (MasterIn / SlaveOut) : data line used for the transmission from slave to master; Excluding the SS signal, which can be handled separately, the bus should be considered a 3-wires bus. The master is responsible f ...

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The source code had a bug with respect to editing Multibyte registry values which has now been fixed.

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Having already written something similar on the official forum of the Netduino, Chris Walker (Secret Labs) has written a comment to a post on the official blog of the .Net Micro Framework  team after meet them at MVP Summit of thi year.

He emphasizes that Microsoft seems to be getting more interested in pursuing .NET Micro Framework development (it is now part of the Windows Embedded team), whereas the processors for embedded systems are becoming increasingly powerful and less expensive (eg, the Cortex -Mx) and the C # and VB.Net with Microsoft development tools can start to make difference, especially by leveraging all the developers who have knowledge of. Net Framework.

In short, it seems that 2014 will be a fantastic year for the framework and for the community !

Before the end of this year, I wanted to enrich my uPLibrary a new managed driver for the dual motor driver TB6612FNG that I used earlier this year in a demo at the Microsoft Embedded Conference 2013 on a robot equipped with a Netduino Plus and piloted through the Kinect (thanks to Clement Giorio). The dual motor driver This Toshiba motor driver allows to drive two DC motors (Direct Current) with a maximum power of 15 V and with four operating modes: CW (ClockWise), CCW (CounterClockWise), short brake and stop. Also, the speed of each motor can be varied through a PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) by changing the duty cycle. On the Sparkfun website a useful breakout board that mounts the motor control and makes it easily accessible pins is available. The managed driver The managed driver that allows the use of dual motor driver is represented by the TB6612FNG class that provides two contructors through which you can decide whether to use just one or both engines. For each engine is called a channel (A and B ...

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ARM Task Manger works

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Compact 2013 Registry Editor available.

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The Secret Labs, makers of the famous series of Netduino boards and AGENT smartwatch based on .Net Micro Framework, could not wait for an official release by Microsoft and has decided to make available an experimental SDK for Visual Studio 2013 ! Chris Walker has disclosed the news on the official forum and explained that he had used the open source code of .NET Micro Framework to generate this SDK that will no longer be supported by the Secret Labs when Microsoft will release the official one. Obviously, I have not been able to wait and after installing Visual Studio 2013 I downloaded the SDK to be able to try a simple application on my Netduino Plus board. In addition to the .NET Micro Framework SDK, it is also needed to download and install the Secret Labs SDK, also experimental for Visual Studio 2013. SDK .Net Micro Framework 4.3 (RTM) and SDK Netduino boards The SDK installer is related to the .NET Micro Framework 4.3 (RTM) version and it is perfectly identical to the official as well as throughout t ...

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It’s well known that Microsoft made a very clear choice regarding the use of a DBMS within embedded products, from smartphones (Windows Phone) to tablets (Surface WinRT) via the devices based on Windows Embedded Compact 2013; this choice has a precise name and it is SQLite ! From WEC7 to WEC2013 : SQL Server Compact removed ! As far as Windows Embedded Compact, the change was made from version 7 to 2013, even removing the "SQL Server Compact" feature within Platform Builder Catalog Items (in the "Core" features related to the SYSGEN_SQLCOMPACT variable) through which it was easy to add support for this DBMS into the operating system image. Also, in the official MSDN documentation of .Net Compact Framework 3.9 it is described the removal of SQL Server Compact support within the framework itself and the use of SQLite is reported as a possible "workaround". At this point, we just have to accept the choice made ​​by Microsoft and explore how you can use SQLite in our embedded systems. SQLite : nati ...

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I recently bought a new laptop with the aim of being able to move from developing for Windows Phone 7 to Windows Phone 8 , taking into account all the required characteristics from hardware virtualization to Hyper-V. I install all needed, from Visual Studio 2012 Update 4 to Windows Phone SDK 8 and active Hyper-V but at the time of deployment of a trivial "empty" app to the emulator just to be sure everything works, that's ... nothing works ! The error occurs in deployment time and without any kind of description but with the code 0x80131500 ! Start my wanderings on the net and it seems that the error is related to Windows 8.1 Preview but I have a fabulous Windows 8.1 Professional ! Talking about the problem with Clement Giorio, another DotNetCampania member, I realize that the WP8 emulator does not start and then we plan to create a virtual machine to see if Hyper-V isn’t doing its duty. The upshot is that I can not even create a simple virtual machine in Hyper -V ! Continuing to investigate the ...

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