@Gus_Issa well, you already did the first steps, you have realized and admitted some mistakes, i think that’s one of the hardest parts of your v1 into v2 transformation
I have netduino, arduino, tessel, raspberry pi 2-3, padi, esp8266, esp32, nucleo 401ret, brainpad, I bought almost all the gadgeteer modules + raptors + hydra + spiders, fezcream, fezhat, fezutility, and also I got atsaml21 dev kit… I code in C, C++, Java, kotlin, python, vb, delphi, C#, R, etc… from my perspective, it’s all about how you can deliver ‘value’ to your customers, so company decide what is the best strategy to make their products and services better, unique and different than the competitors. Microsoft is now open for all platform and all languages coz they want everyone can enjoy Azure regardless what are they using… for example, they put a lot of effort to provide IoT SDK to all embedded platforms, they slim down the win 10 to fit in SBC like raspi, joule, dragon board, etc. so how about GHI? I have created a lot of events in my country and introduce gadgeteer concept, netmf, tinyclr… then I collects my audience oppinions… what are they said? 1. expensive, but I understand its because the taxes and delivery cost. so, we can reduce the cost by porting tinyclr to the available dev boards in my country 2. the develoment of tinyclr is slow, of course they need to form and acquire a brilliant team for this or open the code for community contributions 3. community support, I know it’s about language barrier so I created local community 4. more sample code, drivers, projects… so I push the code on github and create some tutorials on youtube.
I have some notes from my experiences when using GHI products:
- nothing wrong with gadgeteer, its just costly… I can perform live demo in front of my customers/audiences from the scratch smoothly. when you start your project use plain netmf or tinyclr.
- if you want to runs faster, just take on C/asm
- drivers and libraries for CAN, usb client/host, glide, sqlite, cryptography are bonuses from GHI, if you want it, take the netmf version and port to tinyclr by yourself
- every platform has it’s own purpose, so, don’t write a blog using asm
- GHI is on the right direction, I love what I see on the back of brainpad case. you can code with python, c++, mbed,…
- the reason why I use C# for embedded is about productivity and time to market, because I have put a lot of investment in this language
so, we need more supports and contributions from people like you…
2 Likes
those were/are arguments to buy the more expensive GHI products… if my company would have to port it other already finished solutions are much cheaper
What company is that?
Returning to the discussion theme, I must say that from my point of view as a teacher who uses Reaper - Boards with many different modules in his lessons under NETMF my expectation would be that by switching to TinyCLR the first thing to do would be to make the Gadgeteer - Boards and modules running out of the box with TinyCLR.
It’s nice to see that a lot of different boards are able to run TinyCLR. But for me and my lessons that has very low relevance.
We baught those Gadgeteer - Kits
- because the ease of making connestions to the modules instead of wiring dozends of cables.
- the possibility to do programming on different skill - levels starting from very easy.
- the suggested long-term availability of the hardware. There are many much cheaper kits which do similar things (e.g. demo-boards) but they often disappear after some months). Unfortunately it was the same with GHI…
- in times where IOT is a important thing Gadgeteer gave an easy approach to handle with networking.
- as we do C# on PCs Visual Studio offered a possibility to do hardware programming without the need to learn a new language and IDE.
You see: at lot of reasons to make a decision to Gadgeteer / GHI.
So my expectation was: If they switch to TinyCLR (I understand the reasons for this), GHI tries everything to focus on the interest of their existing customers and make TinyCLR run as fast as possible to run on Gadgeteer hardware instead of kicking all Gadgeteer hardware stuff out.
To do a port from NETMF to TinyCLR for all the modules we have is a thing where I have a lack of time.
I did it for the N18 - display but it took too much time to scratch together all the information I needed and the hints I got have been only little helpful.
During the port I found out, that with TinCLR the language especially accesing the hardware has become much more complicated. You can see this already if you want to access a single Bit - Portpin. For this you have to programm really long codelines. For many of my pupils this is too complicated.
All in all:
I’m not sure if it is time for us to say goodbye to GHI.
We’ll watch the development for a while, but if there is no progress into the direction I tried to explain, then we have to go.
As i see different people use GHI/non GHI products for their different purpose
- Some for work
- Some for hobby
- Some for their customers
- Some as part of their work with combination (mixed way as me)
And everyone want just buy and sell to customer and want support from GHI for their bussiness
But wait we need to clarify some things
What is what for all things we are talking there
What is requested support
What is requested engineering
What is free and
What is payed
Since nothing is free or have time to loose.
GHI offer lot gamma of products and their products have support too,also this is OK
But do not wait for GHI to do job for you (make a specific driver and other things for non their products)
This a reason of community forum and all people that are attended can (or not - doesn’t matter) provide different help (volunters and share drivers or different source)
Sorry, but I don’t understabd fully, what you want to tell me. (Maybe because I’m German)
GHI was in large parts focused on education and is still (see Brainpad)
They produced kits (we baught many of them) and shortly before the break with NETMF there was (after years) an environment of soft- and hardware in combination with an active community that made it possible to work with this in education.
Then there was this break not only of software but also with the hardware.
We spent quite a lot of time to prepare lessons for the Gadgeteer stuff and maybe you can imagine, that we are somewhat disappointed.
But there was hope that we could at least use our Gadgeteer parts for a while with TinyCLR.
Right now I must see, that it will take a long time (maybe too long for us) until we can really use our equipment which we baught just some months before GHI stopped producing it.
You may know that in schools parts break faster than in industry. Where to get spare parts?
Community? I don’t really see a community so far in comparison to the situaltion before.
I believe that most of the Gadgeteer people moved somewhere else.
The problem is not the money. The problem is our limited time, the lack of an easy to use hardware.and the lack of support.
Sell and forget is not suitable for educational purposes.
I’m not sure @Valon’s response was to you or a more general commentary. Anyway, here’s what I think you need to consider.
Your investment in Gadgeteer hasn’t left you with nowhere to go - all the parts are still usable, including the software pieces you need. So not a lost investment, in my view. Sure, the versions of software you need are all old and stagnant, and any issues are unlikely to be addressed, but things that work today will continue to do so. Unfortunately, at commercial scale, there are no manufacturers who will build modules to replace existing ones, or who will build new modules or new mainboards - you could undertake to build short runs of them yourself, but you won’t get the commercial scale benefits that GHI had. You could approach someone here in the community to take on a short run module remanufacture on your behalf, there’s a few people I am aware of who have looked at this already.
Over time, I’d expect an amount of community contribution adding TinyCLR OS drivers for the remaining Gadgeteer modules that aren’t already covered in some of the work that’s already done mainly via @mifmasterz. This may then allow you to get the benefit of more modern investment in C#/TinyCLR OS and modern VS versions.
But also I’d suggest GHI haven’t “sold and forgot” you. The issue was really with support from Microsoft, not GHI - they prolonged offering what they did much past when Microsoft stopped investing. GHI had to make a hard financial decision, and unfortunately you were one of the affected people. (I have probably $1000 in Gadgeteer parts myself too, so I’m far from immune). I don’t think you can blame GHI for wanting to stay in business (I want them to!), no matter how harsh that decision seems to you.
I’m not telling you that you don’t have problems, but I am saying there’s not much you can’t work around if you think it’s still worth investing. It won’t be a simple “buy a new module as we go” but if you talk about what you might want you’ll probably find someone willing to help
1 Like
I’m just chiming in to say I haven’t quite caved yet and moved on. I’m a diehard fan and am holding on to what little hope I have. I’ve got 50 or so devices in the field relying on good old 4.3. Aim to do twice that next year. While I can thankfully still get the G120, half the stuff I sell relied on a physical LEMUR board, for that whole design I’ve got to start again now. I’m scared of sticking around though. I invested in the windows phone ecosystem for to long as well and got burned there. I’m not turning out to be a good chooser of tool chains. 
1 Like
the schematic is available so 90% of the risk should disappear right there… and the G30 is nowhere near as challenging to create a layout for than the G120 or above…
This is a great forum to share knowledge but we always recommend that we talk directly with commercial customers to work on helping them better. We are the manufacture and we are the engineers behind all of our products. There is no risk if we together work on a good plan for your own products.
1 Like