Gadgeteer article with a Spider, several other GHI and some Seeed devices.
[quote]Until just a few years ago, building a small device with a power supply, a microcontroller, and a set of sensors required quite a bit of skill in electronics hardware design as well as in putting it all together, not to mention good command of the soldering iron. Ill happily admit that Ive personally been fairly challenged in the hardware department—so much so that a friend of mine once declared if the world were attacked by alien robots hed send me to the frontline and my mere presence would cause the assault to collapse in a grand firework of electrical shorts. But due to the rise of prototyping platforms such as Arduino/Netduino or .NET Gadgeteer, even folks who might do harm to man and machine swinging a soldering iron can now put together a fully functional small device, leveraging existing programming skills.
To stick with the scenario established in the last issue, Ill build an air conditioner in the form of a thermostat-controlled fan, where the fan is the least interesting part from a wiring perspective. The components for the project are based on the .NET Gadgeteer model, involving a mainboard with a microcontroller, memory and a variety of pluggable modules. The mainboard for the project is a GHI Electronics FEZ Spider board with the following extension modules:[/quote]
). Hadn’t occurred to me to see if MSDN Mag would be interested in Gadgeteer stuff. Will have to keep that in mind for future projects.
