TinyClr ecosystem expansion

TinyCLR
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One of the things I have always appreciated about GHI is its ability to make embedded development accessible to .NET developers through C#, Visual Studio integration, and a rich set of hardware and software tools.

The recent work on Portal Designer reinforces this vision by making graphical application development even more approachable and productive.

This leads me to a question: has GHI ever considered supporting selected third-party HMI platforms, either through partnerships or community-driven efforts?
Mikroe have developed mature graphical platforms, including the Mikromedia family. These boards support a variety of processor families and development environments.

GHI has already embraced the mikroBUS ecosystem on several products. Users can already combine TinyCLR with Click Boards, creating a natural bridge between the two ecosystems.

From my perspective, an expansion of TinyCLR to selected third-party HMI platforms could offer several potential benefits:

Increased visibility of TinyCLR among embedded developers who may not yet be familiar with GHI.
Exposure to a large audience of engineers, students and educators already using established HMI platforms.
Additional opportunities to promote TinyCLR as a professional .NET embedded solution.
Access to hardware form factors that GHI may not wish to design and manufacture directly.
Increased demand for GHI modules and processors if additional carrier platforms become available.
A compelling combination of TinyCLR, Portal Designer, Visual Studio, and mature HMI hardware.
An attractive alternative for the large community of C# developers looking to move into embedded systems without having to learn completely new development tools.

This could be an opportunity to broaden the reach of TinyCLR and introduce more C# developers to the GHI ecosystem.

GHI has already built an impressive software platform. TinyCLR, Portal Designer, Visual Studio integration, and support for modern communication technologies create a unique value proposition in the embedded world.

For that reason, I am curious to hear GHI’s thoughts:

Do you see TinyCLR remaining exclusively focused on GHI hardware, or could support for selected third-party platforms eventually become part of the long-term vision?
As a long-time GHI user, I believe TinyCLR deserves a larger audience, and I am interested in hearing how the team views future ecosystem growth.

I recently shared a similar idea with Mikroe and here is their response: We appreciate your interest in seeing a combination of our mikromedia hardware and GHI Electronics’ TinyCLR platform.
At this time, we do not have any confirmed plans for such a collaboration or a dedicated mikromedia board supporting TinyCLR 3.0.
However, your suggestion is certainly interesting, and we will be happy to forward it to our product development team for consideration.

Just my 2 cents

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Thank you for writing this out. It is a well reasoned post and I appreciate you taking the time, including going to Mikroe directly.

Let me give you a straight answer rather than a diplomatic one.

TinyCLR running on hardware we do not build is technically possible, but it creates obligations that are hard for a company our size to carry. Every supported board means a board support package, ongoing maintenance as that vendor revises their hardware, and support questions about boards we did not design and cannot debug on our bench. We are a small team. Taking that on only makes sense when there is a business case behind it, and right now the economics point the other way since we would be investing engineering into selling someone else’s hardware.

That said, the part of your post I agree with completely is that TinyCLR deserves a larger audience. We think about that constantly. Where we have been putting our effort is slightly different from your suggestion. We recently released a MicroPython debugger for VS Code, free and MIT licensed, which runs on Pico and ESP32 boards and has nothing to do with our hardware. The idea is that making good tools available widely gets more people through the door than porting our runtime to one more board would.

On the bridge between our ecosystems, I think it already exists and is underused. mikroBUS support means TinyCLR users can use Click boards today, and there are hundreds of them. Drivers for those do not have to come from us. That is a place where community effort scales in a way a full board port does not, and we would happily help anyone working on it.

And if Mikroe ever wants to drive this from their side, with their engineering behind it, I would take that conversation seriously. Their answer to you was a polite no for now, which is fair, since nobody has shown them demand for it. That could change.

Thanks again for the thinking. Posts like this are useful to us even when the answer is not the one you were hoping for.

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Hi Gus, Thank you for the detailed answer. I appreciate the transparency.

I completely understand the maintenance and support concerns associated with officially supporting third-party hardware.
I also understand that maintaining and providing support for boards that you did not design can quickly become expensive.

My original thought was perhaps a little different from porting TinyCLR to a large number of unrelated third-party boards.

What caught my attention is Mikroe’s Multimedia / Fusion platform approach, where the carrier board remains the same while the processor is provided through interchangeable MCU cards. In theory, this seems closer to supporting a processor family than supporting numerous boards, since much of the HMI hardware infrastructure already exists on the base platform.

Whether that actually reduces engineering effort is of course something only GHI and MIKROE teams could evaluate.

I understand and totally respect GHI’s current position. I also agree that expanding the TinyCLR ecosystem through reusable drivers, Click board support, community contributions, and broadly available development tools may provide a better return on investment.

Thank you again for taking the time to provide such a thoughtful response.
And by the way, congratulations to the Team for TinyCLR 3.0.