I am a newbee in .NET gadgeteer so may be I will have dumb questions, but I have problems to start my first project :-(. I have VS 2010 SP1 and I have installed all required libraries and everything istalled with no errors. Now if I start a new gatgeteer project in MF 4.2 then I see in toolbox following groups: Seed, GHI Electronics and Gadgeteer Mainboards. In the GHI group, some modules are marked as Premium and if I try to use them I get message box with text The module could not be added: - A required library could not be found. So I would like to know if this is normal? Second question I have is how can I add modules which are missing in toolbox, for example eBlock expansion module? And third problem I have is: if I start gatgeteer project in MF 4.1, then I see in toolbox only Seed modules, no GHI and no Mainboards groups, so I cannot use 4.1 at all. Do I miss something important? Thanks in advance for any help.
Do not use 4.1
On 4.2, which mainboard did you add in the designer? If you want to use the premium modules then you need to use a premium mainboard http://www.ghielectronics.com/offers
Welcome to the community.
Hi Marwyn,
welcome to the forums !
First up, you need to tell us what mainboard you have.
Second, you need to tell us what netmf SDKs you installed and what firmware version you have on your device?
Then, you may have to uninstall all of that and reinstall it again (being very careful of the order). We’ve seen at least a couple of other people whose toolbox was messed up during the installation and reinstall helped. Make sure VS isn’t running !
Premium devices will only be suitable if you have a premium capable mainboard like a Spider.
I think your other issues are mainly related to the toolbox install issue. Lets work past that before doing anything else?
I got FEZ Hydra, so it is OS hardware, but before I bought this mainboard I checked on the product page that ethernet is supported through ENC28 module and now I see this module as premium in the designer. That’s a little bit confusing. How can I use it to get network working?
The PC I use for this is one month old zenbook with fresh installation of Windows 7 Pro, VS 2010 SP1, VS 2012 and some .NET libraries like is DevExpress etc. On top of this I installed first GHI NETMF v4.1 package and then latest GHI NETMF v4.2 and .NET Gadgeteer Package (october RC). Everything went ok, no errors, no warnings.
I don’t know what fw is on the device, I got everything on Friday and have not yet connected it to my computer, but I am going to update the mainboard with latest fw with ethernet support soon.
I have a lot of eblocks from my previous Panda II projects, which I did hope to use with getgeteer, but the module for eblock expansion is not listed in the toolbox. Is this no more supported?
The ENC module is supported. Just load the Ethernet firmware. You will not need to add anything in designer.
Ok, thank you GUS, will do. I see two copies of FEZHydraMainboardUpdater.exe in installation folders, but both of same size, so I assume they are equal and it does not matter which one I will run, but there is also UpdateFEZHydra.bat which updates TinyBooter. Do I have to run this batch file first?
No need to run the batch file AFAIK. Just the updater.
Added more info here http://wiki.tinyclr.com/index.php?title=Ethernet_ENC28_Module
Thank you Gus, I would run the update without ENC28 connected so you saved me from the trouble with locking mainboard :-).
So Gus, I did run the updater today. With external powersource connected. It found hydra with firmware 4.1.x.x (don’t remember all numbers) and asked if I want to update to 4.2. I confirmed this action, dialog did show up with some progress of erasing… and then this was written to the updater output:
– Log –
Connecting to device… Failed.
Trying to reconnect, please wait…
Failed to communicate with Hydra over serial port. Please reset the Hydra and/or your PC and try again
or visit GHI Electronics – Where Hardware Meets Software for information to update manually.
After reset of everything hydra is no more recognized by pc.
In the main window of Hydra, we have “For additional help, click here”, there are some solutions for you.
Yes, but I don’t have micro sd card of size 2GB or smaller and I doubt I will be able to buy such old stuff anywhere.
And the solution with the wire - I would like to know first what will happen if I leave the wire there not for 5.0 seconds as requested, but for 5.01 second as forbidden with bold text, because I am for sure not able to fulfil such sharp requirement of exactly 5 seconds 
Last option with soldering is not acceptable at all since soldering would remove guarantee in my country.
Ok, I found shop with 2GB cards in stock, so will try this. I hope it will work with 2GB card, because on the page http://wiki.tinyclr.com/index.php?title=Firmware_Update_FEZ_Hydra is written that atmel boot loader does not work with cards bigger than 2GB and then there is text “You will need a card smaller than 2GB for this step” 
marwyn, the time of 5 seconds is pretty approximate. If you leave it there longer than required it’s not going to brick the device it will just not put it into bootloader mode. You will need to show us what the device manager detected device is.
Thanks for explanation - then I will try the wire.
:)) I believe that no one can do exactly 5 seconds :)))
I believe that the board will go into bootloader mode if the jumper is left there for longer, but the software will not be able to write to the flash, as this wire shorts out the flash communications.
It is not good to leave the wire there for days, but a while ago I accedentely shorted pin 9 on one of the “S” sockets to pin 10 which is ground. This had the unintended effect that the Hydra came up in bootloader mode. Took me a good 10 minutes to figure out what was wrong and why I could’nt reflash the board. 
I have no success with the wire between pins 8 and 10 on socket 3, the mainboard is listed as unknown device in device manager and updater fails to connect
So I will try tomorrow 2GB sd card and if this will not work then I must say I got defective piece of hardware and it will go back to store.
Success! I noticed in device manager that windows do not look for device driver automatically, so I enabled this, windows searched for a driver and then hydra was found as a serial camera on com4. Updater found it and then I got window with message “Analysing … (it will take less than 1 minute)”. Well, it took at least 2 minutes, but now I have hydra working with latest firmware. Phew 