Discontinued GHI GT SDK needs an update!

I finally figured out what was wrong, the whole SDK with discontinued modules needed a rebuild. Hence John has not updated the one on the site, I tried building it myself.

I updated the version number i the Shared folder to 4.3.4 and guessed that should be it.

No luck, it never comes out with an MSI, but builds ok. Lots of MSM files though… :wall:

Any ideas? Or other people tried doing it? Or @ John - are you there?

I am trying to deploy a project to a Cobra II with extender. Which requires the mainboard dlls to be built with the right version of the other parts of the framework.

New release of GHI SDK requires rebuilt version of the Discontinued GT Modules SDK…

Because its the mainboard that changes, I feel its needed for this project to have the designer support my work with adding and removing modules…

I have studied the builde guide for mainboards, which states “Just build the solution in Release mode, and the msm and msi files will be generated automatically”.

So maybe it has something todo with me using VS12 Express???

I will look at wix and see what happends.

I managed to build the SDK!!! :dance:

I looked here A quick introduction: Create an MSI installer with WiX - CodeProject

for assistance with using Wix from command-line, and modified a few version numbers in some xml files and then boom. :smiley:

Note to self: Write down how to do it, for every time GHI releases new SDK

The deployment now works fine!

Thank you André for pointing me in the right direction!

@ njbuch - The discontinued SDK was rebuilt for the R3 release. Now that the mainboards are removed, the SDK will not need to be rebuilt when we release a new SDK because none of the modules depend on our libraries.

With your mention in the other thread that this installer does not completely remove old SDKs, it is possible that during the upgrade to the discontinued R3, the removed mainboards were not removed properly which is why they still showed up for you and that is something we will look into.

As for building the SDK, we have changed the structure around some to improve our internal process so following the default Gadgeteer instructions for doing so no longer apply. The below process applies to the discontinued and regular Gadgeteer SDK.

You can either build one module at a time or create a solution and add as many modules and mainboards as you want and build that. Make sure to build in release mode. Each built module will create a file in a path similar to: “Gadgeteer\Modules\GHIElectronicsDiscontinued\AMPM35\AMPM35\bin\Release\Installer\AMPM35.msm”

You will then want to create a new Wix project and use the something similar to the following for the wxs file. (You can learn more about all of that on Wix’s site) Release notes and the installer icon will not work, though you can always look into adding those yourself.


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<Wix xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/wix/2006/wi">
  <Product Id="*" Name="GHI Electronics Discontinued Gadgeteer Modules SDK" Language="1033" Version="4.3.4.0" Manufacturer="GHI Electronics" UpgradeCode="A025DF07-74F8-4C67-92AC-EB5A9D9354BC">
	<Package InstallerVersion="200" Compressed="yes" InstallScope="perMachine" />

	<MajorUpgrade DowngradeErrorMessage="A newer version of [ProductName] is already installed." />
	<MediaTemplate EmbedCab="yes" />

	<Property Id="ARPNOMODIFY" Value="1" />

	<Feature Id="GadgeteerFeature" Title="Gadgeteer Drivers" Level="1" Description="Module drivers for .NET Gadgeteer.">
	  <MergeRef Id="AMPM35MSM" />
	</Feature>
  </Product>

  <Fragment>
	<Directory Id="TARGETDIR" Name="SourceDir">
	  <Directory Id="ProgramFilesFolder">
		<Directory Id="INSTALLDIR" Name="GHI Electronics">
		  <Directory Id="GadgeteerDirectory" Name="GHI .NET Discontinued Gadgeteer Modules SDK" />
		</Directory>
	  </Directory>
	  
	  <Merge Id="AMPM35MSM" SourceFile="Gadgeteer\Modules\GHIElectronicsDiscontinued\AMPM35\AMPM35\bin\Release\Installer\AMPM35.msm" Language="1033" DiskId="1" />
	</Directory>
  </Fragment>
</Wix>

Make sure to update the version in the above xml code and AssemblyInfoGlobal43.cs, AssemblyInfoGlobal42.cs, and version.wxi under “Gadgeteer\Modules\GHIElectronicsDiscontinued\Shared” as needed.

None of this is supported obviously and, if you do do it, your version numbers may conflict with ours or something else entirely could go wrong and we cannot say how that will impact future releases or other interactions with our SDK.

@ John - Thanks John.

Can you just clarify this: Can I, without rebuilding my own SDK, but only installing the “Discontinued GT GHI SDK” actually start a project based on Cobra II Eco Extender?

After re-installing and removing all stuff I found that the “Discontinued GT GHI SDK” only added the modules to the toolbar, but not the mainboards.

But maybe that was not intended behavior?

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@ njbuch - That is the intended behavior. In the R3 release we removed the mainboards from the discontinued SDK. As such, you cannot use the FEZ Cobra II Eco Extender, Net, or WiFi mainboards with only the discontinued SDK.

You can manually add an entry to the registry for that mainboard after you have compiled it if you don’t want to build your own installer. Look into the keys

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft.NETGadgeteer\v2\HardwareDefinitionFolders

and

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft.NETMicroFramework\v4.3\AssemblyFoldersEx

You can probably point those paths to be anywhere for the mainboard you need. Make sure the layout of your folder mirrors what you see in C:\Program Files (x86)\GHI Electronics\GHI .NET Gadgeteer SDK\Mainboards\FEZCerberus

I dont understand that sentence - please clarify.

@ njbuch - Unless you manually build your own installer or libraries, you cannot use those mainboards. They are no longer included in any of our SDKs.

Nice… very nice indeed… Cobra II Extender support is gone, we are on our own now…

Why do you keep doing this to us? One day it is there, another day - it is gone. One day it is working, another day it no longer works.

I don’t understand this practice of silent decision (some of which are very user unfriendly) making.

What’s the point of using Turnkeyassembly if mainboard does not have software support anymore?

2 Likes

@ iamin - I agree with you and we are making sure this does not happen in the future. The good news is that we are here do let us know what you are trying to connect and we will help you to accomplish what you need.

is there a chance that you just collect all the discontinued sdk into one, so that some like me who just started with gadgeteer still can profit from getting these tools. I am a bit afraid that some day parts which I have in my starter getting unusable because the are discontinued and I need to learn it the hard way.

@ papezr - there is already an sdk that includes all discontinued modules. Take a look at the support page please. We also still provide the sdk for devices that we discontinued years ago. :slight_smile:

Welcome to the community.

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I need Cobra II Eco with Extender to work with the latest Gadgeteer package. I want to be able to use Gadgeteer sockets on Extender module.

@ iamin - to connect which modules?

@ Gus - I will connect two custom modules. I need sockets K and P.

Exactly my point, just use pure netmf. Your code will be better portable to non gadgeteer boards as well. For example, k socket is simply COM2.

@ Gus - Perfect, didn’t now that, but now I can continue to use hopefully all the older/discontinued modules as well. At least it worked for the TemperatureHumidity (GM344) connected to a raptor and reporting the measurements to azure.

@ Gus - “Gadgeteer is a rapid prototyping platform”. I wrote Gadgeteer drivers for my modules and I like to use plug-and-play option.

Anyway, I want to get Cobra II Extender support back.

I guess I need to add this request to Task Tracker section. And we could see how many people would like see Extender working again. Of course, if someone from your staff is going close that thread instantly, then there is no point.