This will not be a technical question but an overall statement for GHI, Gadgeteer and the Gadgeteer developers. I never take the time to communicate feelings. I generally just ask and answer technical questions. But this time I just wanted to express my complete sadness at the loss of gadgeteer. I know there are hundreds of alternatives to gadgeteer, and I have used most them (duino included), but truly for a lot of things gadgeteer was the best. And honestly, GHI has done a great job of supporting it.
Recently I had some issues with my security camera hobby setup at my house. I have 10 cameras placed around my house and almost all of them use a RS485 PTZ setup. Since I used “baluns” (camera connect to CAT5) for wiring the system I have some impedance issues when I connect a certain expensive PTZ camera to the PTX control circuit. Adding this camera caused movement control issues across the system. I tried many things to solve my issue, but each never completely solved the issue. At the end, I decided to isolate this camera’s control via a RS485 optical isolator. I found almost all the isolators to be more expensive than I liked, so I tried an alternative. I used an old Spider and connected 2 RS485 connectors and built a small app to repeat PTZ traffic from the RS485 network onto this single camera’s RS485 connection. This worked perfectly and proved that isolation was my best answer at this point.
Now I was just going to then purchase the cheapest isolator I could find. But then I had this idea. How about adding features via this Spider board?
This is what I did:
Added a display for diagnostic monitoring
Added Ethernet and for a web server and direct socket connections
Added USB to serial for remote debugging.
Created a Raptor based module that, by using a WIFI connection, a display and joystick can be used to remote control any camera in the system
Web server supports controlling the camera PTZ via a cell phone!
I have been developing software and embedded systems for decades and truly, gadgeteer was the simplest, fastest and the most fun way to create fast projects at home.
I am extremely sad to see it go. Sorry to bore everyone with this post, but wanted to say my piece. Thanks, GHI and all!!!