Or mBed Development boards | Mbed
Loads of different development boards (including ST Nucleo) and you can build your own from the PCB up if you want it even cheaper.
The Outrageous Circuits mBuino is really capable and dirt cheap to boot. http://www.outrageouscircuits.com/shop/product/11
Maybe you are right, but at them moment I can use C# for
-App development
-Web Applications
the only thing I donāt use it at the moment is on low end microcontrollers.
NetMF would bring the world of microcontrollers to our .Net developers -> higher productivity and easier interfacing between the componentsā¦ And much better code porting possibilitiesā¦
This is do damn trueā¦
What we need is a port for a cheap chip with a bit more flash and ram. Just like the AtMega lineup, just with NETMF.
@ Reinhard Ostermeier - To you, what would a cheap chip cost? Roughly how much ram and flash would it have?
Iād be happy with a <$20 Cerb SoM. Iād pee my pants for a <$35 Cerb SoM that also had on-board WiFi (CC3x00, ESP8266, etc.)
I think no less than 1M ram and as much RAM as availiable would make it very flexible.
Iām not particularly cost sensitive, but $15 to $20 bucks for a chip sounds competitive. More for a SOM though.
WiFi is exciting, but dudeā¦TMI. 
Iām curiousā¦why are there no boards with built-in Bluetooth? One of the things Iāve read a lot recently is speculation on how the proliferation of devices will impact networks. Should every device really have an IP address? Do we really need to have the overhead of a complete TCP/IP stack on every micro? Seems to me that some scenarios call for simpler communication for many devices, with a PC or a higher-class device acting as an intermediary when itās necessary to talk to the cloud.
Iāve seen several examples of this in the Arduino spaceā¦just wondering where the NETMF equivalents are. Some examples:
http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/Bluetooth-Bee-Standalone-p-1157.html?cPath=19_21
A netmf device that could be programmed and debugged wirelessly would be v. Cool too.
Thatās really hard to say.
I usually take a little bigger than needed, because you never know.
By ābiggestā app so far runs on a G120 and uses about 60 to 70% of RAM, needs about 2 or 3 min to read all info from SD on startup and initialize, and is then when running 100% busy with network communication and data processing.
But thatās an extreme.
Iād say about 1 or 2 MByte available RAM, and enough flash so you donāt need to turn every bit before you use it (I remember using Medusa Mini with Modbus protocol and display :wall:
G120 module is great but too expensive. Here in Germany it costs over 40 EUR
http://www.watterott.com/de/G120-Module
We need something similar to the STM Discovery boards (costs 16 EUR) ā¦
Mouser is only 30
personally, youāre not comparing things of parity.
Discovery boards are as you expect, offered by STM to promote their chips. They are examples of what you can do with the processor, they are a reference architecture in themselves, but they are not a guaranteed-supply, robust commercial āmoduleā that you can continue to rely on as a core part of a commercial product. They are a development board more than a product.
I think anyone would struggle to assemble a discovery board equivalent product for the price - they are likely loss-leading from ST, as a way to promote the platform. As I said earlier, great for a one-off or testing the waters, but this price delta means theyāre not something you can then go make yourself cheaper.
If you contrast that to say an Arduino, then itās relatively easy to go and ācloneā an Arduino into your own design and expand on it, and it will likely cost you the same or less. Same with a Cerb40 - the BOM cost is similar to the cost of the device itself.
Now youāve said this is a commercial product. I am guessing your ādeviceā is expected to be cheap, and because weāre having this ācostā discussion that the software cost (firmware) is not very complex nor hard to write - because that is where C# will help you decrease the overall cost of the solution, allowing you to have potentially more ācross purposeā developers produce code quicker and to leverage the benefits the Visual Studio development and debugging environment give you. Perhaps the BOM cost isnāt the most important thing in your cost base after all - I donāt know.
Exactly true, your spot on! Knowing that NETMF will speed dev work considerably and not needing to maintain firmware, just the apps justifies a ābit extra costā if you can call it that, for instance recently in this thread there was a mention to mbed, every platform there which can run RTOS is more expensive than G120, others just cant run it.
AVR runs an RTOS (Femto RTOS). There are a zillion RTOS for ARM systems, there are RTOS for MSP430.
Thereās even a FreeRTOS port for the 8051. Impressive, if you ask me, an RTOS in 8k of RAM on an 8-bit MCU. The venerable 8051 isnāt exactly cheap anymore, though. If youāre looking for the cheapest path to an RTOS, my money would be on a Cortex-M0 running FreeRTOS, or maybe ARMās CMSIS RTOS.
I was just referring to pricing, i.e. this costs $20 but flash size to small for mbed-rtos
http://developer.mbed.org/platforms/LPC1114FN28/
this can run it but is $45-$49
http://developer.mbed.org/platforms/mbed-LPC1768/
I can make my own board with G120 and all the parts for $45-$50
For FreeRTOS:
Atmel SAMD20 will run it, $5.40 in ones from Digi-Key.
Infineon XMC1302 will run it, $3.12 in ones from Digi-Key.
NXP LPC1100 will run it, $2.80 in ones from Digi-Key.
Youāll need a few passives and a board, but they shouldnāt add up to much, especially if youāre making more than one or two.
The STM32F0DISCOVERY board will run it, and itās available for just a bit over $12 shipped to me here in the USA. As a bonus, you also get all sorts of goodies, including the STLink debugger.
Well, the cerb40 seems to have an interesting price, but it seems, that it does not support professional features like in-field update or USB Client or just save a few bytes into the flash (e.g. application settings). Without this features it is difficult to use it for commercial purposesā¦
Are those features expected to be integrated into a future version of the GHI Firmware?
None of them can be hand soldered except Infineon one, and if I donāt need an expensive commercial compiler, external debugger?? It might just be usefull
A real system that I use the very moment now: LPC11C24 (which is in LQFP package, so solderable by hand easily), + Lpc Link 2 Debugger LPC-Link2 - Embedded Artists , + EmBlocks (so itās a free GCC) IDE, + FreeRTOS. Works flawlessly, and it would be hard to find a cheaper solution.