Even before SITCore became publicly available, it became popular that there are many companies with SITCore at it’s heart today. One of them is a Kickstarter campaign by MikroBus.Net and it is called the The Ram!
This board takes advantage of MikroElektronika’s MikroBUS standard sockets, bringing hundreds of available click modules to your design.
Of course our friends at MikroBus.Net didn’t just give you hardware, but also built an ever-growing open-source library of drivers for many click modules.
With SITCore SCM20260E at its heart that runs TinyCLR OS, the Ram board will give you secure connectivity, with world class development environment, through C# in Microsoft VisualStudio.
I want to publicly thank GHI for their support during the birth of this project !
They were kind enough to put up with my bad temper more than I would have been able to endure myself
We could not do less than let them build this board. This will ensure very good quality and sustainability to this board.
And you will get all the best from TinyCLR and all its nice features, of course.
Nice indeed !
I wonder if we should not use them instead of standard headers. That would be a small increase on the overall cost (that we won’t pass on the sale price) but they look more professionnal and solid.
Those headers are neat. They help to avoid alignment issues, especially the SMD version.
I can see is that it has the word Click on them and I thought that name was reserved for Mikroe use only? I assume having this on the sockets purchased from them is OK?
From what I remember in old email exchanges with them, the only thing you are not allowed to do is to build Click modules and name them “Click xxxx”. This is indeed reserved for their own use.
The KS campaign is clearly a failure : 2 backers in 20 days is a proof that our board is not of any interest. It’s sad to say but it’s a fact.
We have to find 97 more backers in less than 20 days. We then have to be realistic and draw the consequences.
First one will be the cancellation of the KS campaign before it comes to its end. @Brett and @Philippeb, to thank you for your interest, I will contact you privately to see how we can satisfy you despite this cancellation.
Second, we have received a request from MikroElektronika who is asking us to change our identity and ask us to not use the term “MikroBus” anymore in our products and communications. Even the mikrobusnet.org domain is concerned.
We cannot “fight” against this request, so we will execute.
The immediate effect will be the disappearance of the current MBN website, forum and Github repo in a couple of days/weeks. The Github repo will be transferred to a new location (on Github).
The second consequence is that we will stop to exist as a company. Stephen and I will continue to code drivers and create boards but as individuals.
Unless it hurts MikroE’s lawyers, we will now use a new domain name : “mbnsoftware.net”. Our logos will of course change as well as our emails.
The RAM board will now look like this :
Back to the board itself, the second prototype is not perfect yet. It still has two issues, one because I am an idiot and a second one that needs some investigation :
The serial debugging is not working… because I did not connect it to UART5 Idiot inside…
The board is not recognized by Windows when it’s not powered with external power supply. Kind of weird issue here as the board itself is working as expected with only USB power. But the USB device is not exposed. I will create a dedicated post for this.
Although it does not please me, it’s still understandable. They want to protect their trademarks and their usage. They think that users/customers may find misleading and confusing at the very last our company name.
So far, it’s a “friendly” request, But the terms of our exchanges are clear : we will have to change things. They will give us time for this.
It’s just too bad that it happens now, after more than 6 years. But that’s life and we have to live with that and act accordingly.
Idiot inside…