Hi,
today I want to write a report of my experiences in getting Gadgeteer ready to run in my lessons including wishes towards GHI for the future.
Here we go:
After several years of watching Gadgeteer I decided this year in spring that it was far enough developed to give it a try in my lessons.
In May I ordered 20 Cerberus Tinker Kits. Because of bureaucracy problems in the administration of my country it lasted until early August to get the kits.
Together with a collegue I started to prepare the kits. We had to:
- Install the software. Here we had the following issue. Because of my experiments before I knew that Gadgeteer Core has Bugs. So I had fixed them according to the advices on Codeplex. After installation of Gadgeteer Core I had to overwrite these files with the recompiled.
- Update the firmware. Especially updating the Tiny Bootloader is really annoying.Additionally some boards had a loader button some not. It is a drag to shortcut two holes 10 times.
- Unpacking the modules and mounting distance holders on the modules to prepare them for the holey board.
- Soldering pins on the extenders we baught additionally because we need them for our experiments.
All in all we needed more than 30 hours to get the classroom and the kits ready to run in our lessons.
This was all besides our lessons and without payment as it is usual in Germany.
Next month Iāll start my lessons. I hope it was worth the work!
Questions to GHI:
- Do you know when there will be a fixed Core - package or can you offer one yourself?
- Can you make the update process of the firmare (Tiny Booter) easier?
- Is it possible to get Extenders and similar with soldered pin headers?
- Unfortunatly GHI replaced the FEZ Cerberus during the time between ordering and shipment. Bad luck, you may think but what shall I do if I need more Kits or a replacement of damaged boards? For us it is important to have the same board for all pupils. Please make your announcements and plans far earlier and keep older boards in stock at least for replacements.
- Can you please remove the warning that the board is āold fashionedā from the compiler warnings!! We know this and donāt need to be remembered every 5 minutes and three times per compiling!
- Make NetMF 4.3 as standard for new projects. Otherwise this is often forgotten to be setup by the pupils and the programs donāt work.
- Can you please update your samples to the new environment. Sometimes it takes more work to get your samples run under the new environment than to write them new. Unfortunately this is oftentimes too hard for beginners.
My conclusion is:
It takes a lot work to prepare Gadgeteer for classrooms besides developing content for lessons.
It would be very helpful if GHI would concentrate more on making this easier.
Manfred