It looks interesting but way too expensive for my taste. My Arduino Yun which can do the same things andt more only costed me $75 (which I already thought was quite steep). But the Pinoccio with Wifi backpack would cost you $197. I think anyone wanting to seriously enter the IoT market will have to be able to offer a simple WiFi board at sub $30. Unless these guys can drastically slash their prices, I doubt it will become popular.
It’s expensive compared to the likes of the Spark Core with WiFi and I can get that for the same price as the basic Pinoccio without WiFi. $197 is a lot of money to put something on the net.
In fact, I got the Spark Core, JTAG debug and shipping for $60. Not sure how good it is but at that price it’s worth a little play.
Same feeling as NJBUCH, I also don’t like Arduino dev software. Lack of debugging is a major feature that is missing.
Do any of the other products you guys mention have a rechargeable battery option?
Right now for me at least there are so many Arduino options it is hard to keep track. While I agree with the lack of software tools, I do agree with @ mhectorgato that it has a lot of momentum.
I have high hopes for the CC3000. That, plus a cheap Cortex-M0 should be viable at the $30-$35 price point, given sufficient volume.
You can have debugging, too. Even Arduino lacks debugging only because the IDE doesn’t support it, not because the hardware isn’t capable of it. Hook up your JTAGICE and open up Eclipse and you’re off to the races.
Which is why NETMF is so wonderful – plug in your USB (no additional hardware required) and fire up, [em]arguably the best[/em], IDE (free or paid) in the business and you’re winning the race.
Right. The downside, of course, is that it requires the biggest, most expensive, most power-hungry microcontrollers to run. Can you imagine a NETMF compiling to native code on a Cortex-M0?
For the F1 series, actually. Prototypes of the Mountaineer boards used the F2 series, the final versions used the F4 series. F3 is rather new and seems like a more specialized series.
It serves a different market than the tiny Arduinos with/without communications – like the Spark (with CC3000), DigiSpark (tiny form factor), BLEDuino (BLE 4.0).
We’ve got the Cerb40-II that’s similar. Microbe (Justin) will bring a tiny form factor as well.
Other than those 2 manufacturers, is there anyone else making .NetMF in a similar form factor?
They have FPU and DSP but too small memories for NETMF. Up to 48 KB RAM; up to 80 KB RAM seems to be planned for later (which would be ok for small applications).