Friday morning my package from Switzerland arrived and its being killing me as previous commitments Friday and Saturday have prevented me from trying it until now. I ordered the USB Mainboard from http://www.mountaineer-boards.com as I had heard some good things about this board from a couple of people so I was rather eager to try it out. The board is about half the size of the Cerberus and has built in power, so all you do is connect the USB to the mainboard and you have a powered system, complete with a button built into the mainboard so I whipped up my typically HelloWorld program, which is to flash the debug LED every half second.
using Microsoft.SPOT;
using GT = Gadgeteer;
using Gadgeteer.Modules.Mountaineer;
namespace MountaineerTest1
{
public partial class Program
{
private bool _flash;
private GT.Timer _timer;
void ProgramStarted()
{
Debug.Print("Program Started");
Debug.Print(Mainboard.MainboardName);
Debug.Print(Mainboard.MainboardVersion);
_timer = new GT.Timer(500);
_timer.Tick += new GT.Timer.TickEventHandler(_timer_Tick);
buttonForMountaineer.ButtonPressed += new ButtonForMountaineer.ButtonEventHandler(buttonForMountaineer_ButtonPressed);
}
void buttonForMountaineer_ButtonPressed(ButtonForMountaineer sender, ButtonForMountaineer.ButtonState state)
{
if (_timer.IsRunning)
{
_timer.Stop();
}
else
{
_timer.Start();
}
}
void _timer_Tick(GT.Timer timer)
{
_flash = !_flash;
Mainboard.SetDebugLED(_flash);
}
}
}
To start using this board everything you need is located here:
Including USB drivers and Mountaineer Gadgeteer 4.2 SDK and of course you will want to start by having a quick read of the ‘Get Started with Mountaineer’ intro to the platform as it explains installing everything and getting your first project running.
So far my experiences with the folks at Mountaineer would best be summed up as Jeremy Clarkson from Top Gear would say, ‘Gus’s European Cousins’, as they have been very helpful and answered all my questions etc.
In short I’ll be trying this board out in further experiments as it appears thus far to be a definite keeper.
Thanks for that! Cerberus is plenty small for most projects. At roughly the same cost as a Hydra, it would be difficult to justify buying many of the Mountaineer boards.
[quote=“Duke Nukem”]So far my experiences with the folks at Mountaineer would best be summed up as Jeremy Clarkson from Top Gear would say, ‘Gus’s European Cousins’, as they have been very helpful and answered all my questions etc.
In short I’ll be trying this board out in further experiments as it appears thus far to be a definite keeper.
[/quote]
Looking forward to the update!
How is the STM32F407 related to the Cerberus’ processor (STM32F4)? Is it the same?
The MAC is embedded, the PHY is not. It’s not clear to me why GHI and Oberon (apparently) have chosen to go with an ENC28J60 instead of using a PHY module (as is done with the Spider). Maybe the software is simpler to implement. Using a PHY would probably consume more I/O pins than the SPI solution, I guess. The upshot is that pre-built ENC28J60 modules are available very cheaply (a whole module can be had for much less than just the bare W5100 chip used by USBizi).
@ godefroi - ah you’re right.
With that mac configuration you need minimum 9 pin from mcu to connect a transceiver like Lan8720 chip. So spi use a lot less pins.
They are identical.