Very excited to see Lymx is almost a reality.
I would like to know if running code on a PC via FEZ Lynx will stlll be consrained to the 20ms time slice we have on normal mainboards. Or will you be able to make the code run much faster?. For example… say I want to sample an A/D as fast as I can.
I’m also curious to know if in.terrupts will be relayed back to PC program
“I would like to know if running code on a PC via FEZ Lynx will stlll be constrained to the 20ms time slice we have on normal mainboards. Or will you be able to make the code run much faster?. For example… say I want to sample an A/D as fast as I can.”
…I’ve been reading an 18bit ADC at 30Mhz and writing to my display at 30Mhz using a “normal mainboard” (STM32F4 based with netmf). And those speeds are limited by the ADC and my display, I could go faster. I just lean on the hardware features and native code for anything time sensitive.
Does the netmf runtime on Linux use the MCU’s hardware features or is it simply bitbanging?
Fez Lynx (as I understand) is just a port extender chip that is connected through (UART, SPI or I2C) to another FTDI (USB-to-whatever) chip. This allows you to talk to Lynx using virtual com port on your PC. There is no netmf.
Interesting. I presumed (like an idiot) that this was something like the Raspberry Pi where netmf runs from a Linux environment. So what’s the hardware driving the SPI/I2C? An MPU? How is this any different than controlling the Cerb, etc. via USB from the PC?
I see 3 ICs on the board:
The hardware is FT4232HL chip:
Quad High Speed USB to Multipurpose UART/MPSSE IC
There is a high level API that you can use (instead of virtual COM Port, which is available as well, but not as powerful as their high level API).
That DLL is available on Windows, OSX, Linux and Windows CE.
Edit. You need to copy/paste the link above. Brackets in the link broke it 
@ mhectorgato - I suspect that the last chip is an ADC chip.
One of the great advantages of lynx is that it does not have firmware. Nothing to update nothing to worry about.
The software running on the hosting system is everything needed. The hosting system can be about anything including raspberry pi for example.
It is definitely a very interesting piece of hardware. Looking forward to get my hands on one of these. 
This is lynx for now. Which can be easily extended using the hub module to give you more sockets. We will be adding more images.
Makes sense. Thanks.
nice nice nice! But, like some other people where asking, will there be a mono compatible driver :
@ Per Cramer - It works with anything, including mono
Well that is great! But is there any sample code available then? Because i can’t find any on the ftdi site.
It is just a dll. if you know how to use them in mono then you can easily convert any of the examples.
Are you saying that access from managed code would be via interop, or there will be a managed DLL?
@ Gus - Is the DLL available for download? My Lynx is coming today.
Oh I guess I was not clear, sorry. I am talking about the FTDI DLL. Our libraries are not built into a DLL but I think this maybe a good idea for the future.
So the answer to, “can use FEZ Lynx with product X?” is “yes on almost anything”. FTDI’s DLL is provided to access Lynx on many platforms and the code we provide is generic/portable C++ code that we have it working on many different systems and operating systems. And it can be made into a DLL if someone wants to do that.
BTW, the same C++ libs are also tested on FEZ Medusa with the Arduino IDE.
Ok, that makes sense. I knew about the FTDI dll, but I thought you guys building a high level wrapper for it. I am going to make my first Lynx demo tonight