Is $250 for FEZ Spider kit a good value? You get a 3.5" color touch screen, you get camera, you get camera, you get USB host support, you get 16MB or RAM + 4.5MB of FLASH a lot more that I can list here. For FEZ Spider software, I wouldn’t even know where to start, so much more than you can use compared to the limited Arduino. Not to mention the commercial possibilities for FEZ and Gadgeteer, not just the fun side of things.
There is a new kit from 8-bit Arduino with far less capabilities in hardware and software than FEZ Spider. The kit is selling for $359.00 at makershed!! To that price, I say GHI should make the Spider kit $500 easy
Of course, the answer is obvious. However, not visible to so many potential customers. Why don’t we see GHI products at MakerShed or Adafruit? Still don’t see any Gadgeteers on SparkFun…
Dont forget that the Arduino and its clones (from other ppl; trying to get into the market) are also used in Apple CPUs [some ppl are trying to tap into “that” imarket], its all great in the onpen source community. But some of the main diffirences is where the Gadgeteer uses the .NETMF mainly, and where the Arduino uses its own compiler and Apples has its own versions of the complier.
Its all great, just give it some time… you’ll start to see all these great works from the .NET community as more people start to understand the .NETMF for small embeded divices.
In my opinion from what I’ve seen in my Robot Club… the Gageteer just over did it with its simplicity…lol
Wait, was I supposed to get two cameras in my kit, or is Gus stuttering on the keyboard again?
Of course the maker kit is way overpriced. Almost half of those modules are single color LEDS!! All
the kits on maker tend to be overpriced IMO. The high cost seems counter to the maker culture, but then, they can’t survive on subscriptions alone. They also have a a history of reselling other vendors electronics at high prices, so it is not entirely out of character. I think they even had their own brand of uC at one point.
@ ianlee74 - Adafruiters tend to be very arduino exclusive for several reasons that have nothing to do with performance and price. Lady Ada is a BIG reason the Arduino is so popular in the US. They (Ada-folks) do a great job bringing noobs into the uC (aka Arduino) world, and they purposefully keep their sites on that market. Also, I think there is still a big stigma attached to anything (for example, NETMF) that comes from big corporations like Microsoft with that crowd. Cost and performance don’t matter when you’ve got principals to uphold, you know.
Don’t even bring up that taboo name ARDUINO up. How someone can take an off the shelf Atmega and slap it on the board and everyone and their brother buys it is just dumbfounding to me.
I still am in amazement how that silly thing ever got so dam popular as it did. Just utter craziness.
To me the FEZ Spider is a kit with the purpose is to get newcomers on board to GHI and .NETMF.
With that in mind then i would have to be honest and say its to steep of a cost. These ARDUINO- ian’s seem to mainly have a hobbyist type budget. (which is nothing wrong with that, just saying)
Personally i would just make a single board kit with those external boards parts on it to lower the cost further down.
Arduino has its uses and can be great for many things but like everything is not the answer for every problem, nor is anything else for that matter. But what is great about NETMF/FEZ is that you are using/learning something that can be taken professionally on a very high level. For example, you can take the same knowledge to program 200Mhz ChipwrokX wiht near zero learning curve. Or you can take .NET/C# and program a PC of you want to!
Possibilities go even further with GHI’s RLP letting you load native code on the device to configure it anyway you like or even by using the porting kit and digging into the source codes if that is what you need.
Why the ARDUINO exploded so fast and yet the FEZ products seem to have a slower start is strange to me. With my main job and side jobs, learning C# and .netmf is coming very slow. It is my hopes to get up to speed soon and help put GHI on the map.
I am SO GLAD i am plugged into GHI products, and awesome forum & members.
Maybe I should not have worded it quite like that, saying “FEZ”. But rather .netmf. However they go hand in hand. Since discovering .netmf i have talked to quite a few of my engineering buddies and none of them have heard about .netmf. So i only makes sense they have not heard of GHI. Which is a shame.
.netMF is just not in the minds of most engineers when it comes to a new design and what product they are going to use. Why i dont know as i am new to this whole thing myself. Which is the main reason why i am still leery of the whole .netmf thing. Its seems to be the slickest thing, but yet more people than not know about it. So i keep asking myself why is that. What black hole have i not discovered with it yet.
Gus, dont get me wrong, i think all of the products are GHI are sensational. I am a hooked customer.
I see, NETMF wasn’t marketed for hobbyists/education at first. Even GHI didn’t have anything for hobby or education. Seeing the great value of NEMTF, we introduced FEZ in an arduino form factor then netduino come after and I bet many other will pop up soon. NEMTF maybe slower in catching on but I believe it will be the future of embedded devices.
GHI is putting thousands of dollars into NETMF and new FEZes, we have many more to come. Microsoft is invested in NETMF/Gadgeteer as well. Things will just be more and more exciting overtime.
I think they are way overzealous with the whole “open source” thing. Especially Adafruit. Their first comments after the official Gadgeteer/Spider announcement - “is it open source?”. Search their blog and you will find a lot more posts about Netduino, but nothing about Fez boards,even though Fez boards are superior and richer in functionality. Again because Netduino is “open source”. (I don’t have anything against Netduino, I have all tree ;D. I came to Fez from Netduino)
I agree that companies like Adafruit are very influential in this field, but that puts more responsibilities on them as well.
Also keep in mind that the trio - Adafruit, Make and Wired is a tight circle. If you are in favor with one of them you are pretty much getting the power of all three.
How can we fix it?! That where community is very important. Blog more about your projects and experiments.
A slower evolution of NETMF than Arduino is easy to understand.
If a person has worked in the Microsoft world with Visual Studio, .NET and C# the power of NETMF is a no-brainer. Such a person understands the power and ease of developing in this exciting environment.
But, looking at it from the perspective of someone who is familiar with C programming in a Linux environment,which I think is more typical of a Arduino person, VS, .NET and C# is a large learning curve.
Often, negative comments about a new technology are not based upon a subjective review, but rather upon our reluctance to change. If we can rationalize the “badness” of a technology we can easily ignore it.
Considering Plato’s Allegory of The Cave, some will face the blank wall seeing the shadow of NETMF but not see reality. Other will see the shadow and turn around and walk towards the light.
I can’t believe I am bringing Plato into this discussion…
I would like to say that since using .netmf and GHI products, training and developing time has reduced significantly, because we have many desktop programmers here, right now only myself and 1 more co-worker are actually from EE background, most new employees are mainly from Comp-Sci background, therefore, getting them up to speed with .netmf and GHI products has saved me a lot of time. Besides, PCB designs are open source, so it allow us to easily slim down the board and change it as the way we like. Heck, I even bought myself a Panda 2 to play with at home Lolzzz. With the ease of use and migration, .Netmf and GHI products will be very popular soon or later. Keep up the great work.
Hopefully we have more hardware projects here, I would love to buy some USBizi100 Chipset and pop it onto our custom boards
When i first heard about the Arduino products i got really excited and did a huge amount of research. It soon dawned on me that as a total newb to the uC world that it would be a realy steep learning curve especially as most of my coding expereince is in C#.
Then i found out about the .NETMF platform and GHI and it was light a lightbulb moment.
Its true that long term .NETMF will come to dominate the market. There will of course always be the anti MS Zealots out there who insist on everything being totaly open source and non MS because “its just better right?” Actually no, having a hybrid system that comprises both open and closed parts increases innovation by allowing actaul money to be made by manufacturers whilst allowing anyone to homebrew or build extensions to a platform in an open fashion. In my view GHI is a true poineer in this new market and should be aplauded for the work they have done and will do in the future.
Edit. And yes $250 is great value when you consider what you get in the kit. I am in the UK and even with the exchange rate as it is its still good value. Shipping cost sucks but thats life :). I would be very interested to hear about which UK distributors will carry the Spider? coolcomponents.co.uk maybe?
It’s a couple of years after the launch of the Gadgeteer,
and apparently it has failed to kill the Arduino.
In the meantime the Arduino Due appeared –
similar hardware to the Gadgeteer, but with some
compatibility with classic Arduino shields and software.
And then the Raspberry Pi and its imitators.
At $25/$35 apiece, you could well consider the Pi
to be a Gadgeteer killer.
In my humble opinion, you fellows have backed the
wrong horse.
[quote=“thegrendel”]
Biased stuff[/quote]
You just stick with Arduino and Pi, we play with that in our labs. But, when it comes to fast prototyping and powerful professionally built modules and addons Arduino comes really short. Not to mention the development environment which is second to none compared to Arduino.
When prototypes are tested and adjusted, the final products can be realized using System On Modules (SoMs), and custom designs, but with the same software.
There is plenty of room for both of us, GHI even make modules that integrates Arduino shields. Its a question of time for an Arduino board that has sockets for Gadgeteer modules.
To most of us here, time is money. I’d rather spend an evening with my kids, than trying to hack a driver in c to get something simple done.
Cost and performance don’t matter when you’ve got principals to uphold, you know.