I’m a software guy with an interest in robotics, I recently heard about .net gadgeteer and I’m really excited about the possibilities. I’ve been doing some research over the last few days, and I’m curious about how things are expected to pan out over the next few months, since that’s going to influence which model I buy.
Due to the “scratch an itch” nature of OSS development, the features that get added are usually what the people working on the core system need. On the other hand, commercial developers want to sell as many gadgets as possible, so they tend to come up with a design meant to appeal to as many people as possible. I’m looking at the different gadgeteer motherboards on GHI’s site, and I can see that the most powerful ones are both OSH - the Cerberus in particular looks like a dynamite little board. However, which features of those boards actually get firmware support will depend a great deal on how GHI “seeds” development with a core of working code that the rest of us can contribute to. Otherwise simple, common things like SPI will get added and perfected really soon, while tricky or less common features will take a lot longer (eg netduino only got SDHC support a few months ago, when a forum member with both the need and the means implemented it).
This finally leads to my question: if one draws a line with just a link to a datasheet on the one end and full parity with the premium non-OSH firmware on the other, where along that line is GHI’s planned support for firmware on OSH devices?
While this is OSHW, GHI is doing most of the work. Look at hydra, it is 95% done and all by GHI alone. With that said, we give priority to our premium offers. We also expect the community to help in OSHW offer, which is essential for any open source offer.
Note that hydra is very very new and it progressed much faster than usual open source offer, thanks to GHI investing thousands of dollars in engineering.
Thanks! I would expect the premium firmware to have priority, but it sounds like you guys see open source as a first-class citizen too, which is great.
[ulist]A Panda III style board, with the Cerberus brain on it. Another Arduino-footprint board has been openly hinted at.
An EMX style module/board, with the Cerberus brain and big hunks of RAM and flash to go with it.[/ulist]
