I’m curious about how many here are actually using NETMF during their “day job” vs just for hobby. I have automatic search bots setup on Dice & Monster now for the past 2-3 years that are searching for anything in the U.S. with NETMF or “.NET Micro” in the title/description and I have yet to see a single post for a job with this requirement. I’m really curious to know if this is really just a hobby platform or if there are any commercial products coming out on it. Has anyone compiled a list of off-the-shelf products based on NETMF? If you are using it in your day job where are you posting your job listings?
Hi,
I’m not sure if it’s what you are looking for - I mean, do you rather want to know about TinyCLR fellows or about anybody? Because here is one guy showing his product: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/netmfteam/archive/2011/08/24/netmf-4-2-contributor-and-a-cool-product.aspx
Personally, I have an idea of a commercial product. Actually I can’t predict whether it will be successful or not (I rather mean paper work than development), but after two months of learning C# and .NETMF I think that USBizi would do the work :).
Regards,
Tomasz
Since i have just found .netmf about 3 weeks now i have shown it all to my boss’s. They are very intrigued about it as am I.
I will admit from what i have seen so far i dont understand how its not more popular than it is.
I am still waiting for what i call the “black surprise” to happen. This is when you get a new device or platform and it seems like the best product ever. Then after weeks of development both hardware and software to get to about 90% done, and then the “black surprise” pops out. It is then, when you will say “oh $hit, you have to be kidding me it does not do that!!!”.
So far all of this from .NETMF, VS2010 & GHI products it seems like the best products ever. There has to be a problem somewhere. Something is keeping this whole thing far to quite.
Have you read about RLP? And you know about NETMF being open source? Do you know how much GHI is backing this up? 
For these reasons, there is no “black surprise”
The only “black surprise” and the only real benefit of Arduino vs. NETMF that I see is the cost of going from prototype to “live”. The ability to just pop out the chip in an Arduino and hard solder it to a PCB and then recycle your dev board is huge. If GHI would figure a way to do that with a NETMF board then popularity would skyrocket. Right now, if I want a start a new project or even make a copy of an existing one then I’m looking at a minimum starting cost of $35 (assuming a Panda will suffice). For Arduino, this is more like $5. Of course, we all know the pros/cons so let’s not start down that path again…
Back to the real topic of this thread… What I’m looking for are examples of commercial products that use NETMF. I thought I saw somewhere that Garmin handheld GPS devices were based on NETMF but I can’t seem to find anything about that anymore.
Not really, the 8-bit atmel chip (arduino) will never run everything found on NETMF. If your project is that simple then maybe 8-bit chip is all you need, atmel, picmicro or any other. If your project is advanced and you are using a 32-bit 72Mhz processor then the cost to buy USBizi is about same as buying the raw chip from digikey. So you are getting all work GHI did for near free.
Arduino vs FEZ, you are comparing apples to oranges.
Agreed. But, I’m not comparing FEZ to Arduino. I’m comparing NETMF w/ Visual Studio to C w/ Arduino studio (or whatever it’s called). I’ll go overkill everytime and use the FEZ board for almost everything regardless of the size just for the ease of development. However, this decision keeps me from mass producing anything.
Once i get better familiar with .net, my first plan is to make a mini pci board with just the EMX module on it and the lcd FPC connector. this way i can pop the board out from one test project to another.
[quote]Once i get better familiar with .net, my first plan is to make a mini pci board with just the EMX module on it and the lcd FPC connector. this way i can pop the board out from one test project to another.
[/quote]
Sounds like the Spider?
That’s basically the whole shield concept. Doesn’t really help reduce the cost of mass producing NETMF though.
very much so. except that with the spider the area under the board is useless or wasted space.
if it was designed like this, then the area under the board could be used as well.
I am willing to bet its nerve racking trying to pull a spider off the main board with all those .1" header pins.
Our company is developing a LED controller product based on FEZ panda / domino platform. While we have found a lower cost board for the entry level controller, the FEZ boards are the best price for performance for creating the higher end controller. Our system can stream 16million colors real time to a 1000 LEDs at 20fps or better - go FEZ! When dealing with thousands of dollars in LEDs and power - the cost of the controller board is hardly a factor.
This is not just in development - we have an actual international pilot project approved and in the works.
So while I don’t officially have a “job” that uses this day in and day out - the company I own does and we love the product line. Being able to scale up to the sky is also a major selling point for FEZ.
[quote]1000 LEDs[/quote] :o
do you have a video?
More LEDs!!!
Here is the system running a smaller 200 LED matrix. This is not an official company video - just one I took while working with it.
Also - here is the emulator doing 1000.
I have run 1000 but only in small test mode to test fps and maximum chip update speed, etc. The video of that is mind bendingly boring
Once the customer build the final matrix and makes it interactive using the provided java API - I’ll post more videos.
Thanks for sharing. Do you have real FFT for audio or this is just simulation?
Looks great! Will wait for more videos!
Great stuff! Is there a link to your company products page?
See, now that is a place where i need to work. It a light, bells and whistle designers dream come true.
Real FFT streamed from the PC using a processing library usedin conjunction with out emulator / LED streaming API.
I have also use a spectrum analyzer board from sparkfun/bliptronics for computer free music processing. I posted details on how to use that with FEZ a while back in the supported shields area. Since FEZ is currently used only in our direct computer streaming product I have not used the spectrum analyzer in a FEZ project yet. That said - we just completed our LED suit which will use the spectrum analyzer and microphone setup for real time mobile music response by the suit. If I end up creating a suit controller using the FEZ Domino for USB host capabilities then I will for sure post a video here. I may create a simple project using the “air joystick” … would look great with our robot led suit. More fun than allowed by law I think.
Thanks for providing such a rock solid and advanced environment to work and play in.
Wow - I just replied to a post on the last page - was not expecting so many responses.
My company is hookedup, inc. and my URL is http://www.hookedup.com - you may want to go get some crackers before you go to my cheesy site - will help digest it 
Note: No details on our product yet as we do implementations now but hope to have a release product and some “kits” soon.
I’ll post a video of our LED suit soon. While it is just a fun R&D project - we learn so much making these.
Thanks for all the responses - happy FEZin.