In 4.3, the FEZ Cerb Family of devices have moved to closed source. As a result, they now support the majority of our libary extensions. Due to memory limitations, however, some features are not supported. Keep in mind that other features are not supported due to lack of hardware support such as LCD and built in ethernet. See the FEZ Cerb Family Developers’ Guide for more details.
My Company has build a custom board based on cerberus but with a modified version of the framework because we uses all the pin of the TQFP 144 package (port PF, PG, PH) and also some other serial port remapped on others pins.
Now we are stopped at the last public release of the 4.2 (more than a year ago) and we can not uses the new features…
Have you any plan to release the 4.3 as open or we have to migrate to other open platform?
Alex111, yes that is correct. You must approach GHI if you intend using 4.3 and the Cerberus family for commercial projects. You can clearly see the “not for commercial” branding on the device when it is connected to a PC.
No, that’s not what it means. If you want to do NetMF 4.3 with cerb40 on a commercial project, to use GHIs firmware, you’ll need to either contact GHI to license (I’m sure they will work with you) or you can use an open source build of the firmware. .NETMF is open source (Apache 2.0 Licensed on Codeplex) and there are even a few GCC built firmware packages on github that work on Cerberus.
I look at it this way. Cerb family has all the advantages of open source with the advantages of available Commerical firmware. I actually don’t mind what GHI has done. If you need the vanilla NETMF, go open source, but if you need a unique feature for a commercial project that GHI built, you should work with them to use it.
@ Gus - I tried to get into contact by your online form, but got no response until last sunday.
I try to evaluate your platform as an alternative to our upcoming embedded projects. I try to find a cheap and stable solution with NetMF. Cerb40 looks interesting. But it seems that GHI sells it only for evaluation usage.
What is the cheapest solution you can offer for commercial use?
The netmf porting kit already includes everything you need. With few months or weeks of work you can have your own solution. You can also hire one the experts, like GHI or cuno.
Note that to get the ghi added value libraries, you will need one of the off the shelf products we offer today. This is a much lower cost anyways and much better for anything less than 100,000 units typically.