@ godefroi - The mountaineer boards don’t need a power module
The Cerb bees don’t need a power module
I have a STM32F401 based project running NETMF 4.3.1 which draws ~20mA from a single cell Lipo.
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Sure, that’s why I used the G400 to compare, as it’s the closest in terms of performance (even though it’s not close). In the performance-per-watt race, I bet the Pi wins, if only because of the interpreted nature of NETMF.
Sorry to take this in another direction guys, but Gus, there are a lot of good (and differing) ideas here.
So I am curious as to when this list will be compiled and then what will happen afterwards.
Can we expect feedback directly from Microsoft on this list?
Thanks,
Khalil
Def agree w/ those that say price is the biggest obstacle…the other thing that turned me off were buggy or poorly written drivers for some of the peripherals…which i guess isn’t really .netmf issue, but more a manufacturer problem.
I think really there are only two markets out there worth pursuing…in one Arduino dominates and in the other RaspberryPi (w/ beaglebone right on its tail).
…oh i’m not a big fan of the sockets either. i find for most of the sensors i use, they are a waste unless you start using breakouts. i much prefer just a bunch single gpio, pwm, i2c, etc pins to play with…
@ dizzy I’m a huge fan of the sockets as really that is what makes Gadgeteer unique and enables software guys to come over to building devices. Did a presentation last night where a couple of guys were trying to work with Arduino and Netduino and after seeing Gadgeteer and its sockets etc, they are making the move over to Gadgeteer as it is far easier to prototype devices with Gadgeteer then anything else.
Now as far as drivers go, I’ve seen the same hardware with a better driver elsewhere as well, but really I could always code better drivers and submit them as it is open source and I might do a few this year. It is surprising that even if your a software dude, after playing with Gadgeteer you can start doing hardware stuff as Gadgeteer makes it easier to learn and learn at your own pace.
How’s this for an unpopular opinion: I think that Gadgeteer is the worst thing to happen to NETMF in, well, maybe ever. I think it lead to expensive hardware, poor drivers, confusing programming paradigms, and was a distraction from efforts that could have improved the core framework in ways that would have made it more competitive against its rivals. If Arduino, poor, debuggerless, C-based Arduino can gain a reputation as the microcontroller that anyone can program, even non-programmer artist types, then I think it’s reasonable to believe that being too hard to work with wasn’t NETMF’s budget problem.
Not looking to stir up a fight here, just providing feedback as was asked.
I think you will find Gadgeteer hasn’t taken any resources away from the development of NETMF
Both NETMF and gadgeteer run on the same hardware so apart from the socket cost (cheap from china) there is little difference in manufacture cost.
From my perspective, it looks like when the Netduino arrived with its low-cost Ethernet support and all-the-way open source approach, this gave NETMF a boost. Then Gadgeteer with its “no soldering required” made NETMF more approachable to software developers with a .NET background, which is the most natural clientele for NETMF. This also gave a boost at the time.
At least for simple modules, not needing a microcontroller of their own, the Gadgeteer socket scheme makes sense to me (A, O, I, P, X, Y socket types). Works with built-in NETMF abstractions; no need to even use the Gadgeteer library. Imho the introduction of the C, D, E, F, H, T, R, G and B sockets was a good idea taken too far, especially C and H, for which there is no support in the NETMF core. For commercial projects, I definitely want to be able to work without the Gadgeteer software layer and without drivers that have a dependency on that layer.
Will be interesting to see whether the MikroBus.Net boards will provide the same “no soldering required” advantages as Gadgeteer, without requiring an additional framework layer.
Yeah, I’m curious as well 8)
For those interested http://www.mikrobusnet.org/ is the right url. My phone led me to some transportation agent…
And yes, the MikroBus.Net team hopes that our effort will spur more interest, and more development into the NetMF stuff, which we will all benefit from.
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From my perspective many of the responses here have hit the nail on the head, to name a few, Networking, Low power, Multicore support etc.
I think RLP offers a great way to get below the interpreted stuff I’m certainly no expert ( I have never used RLP) but wouldn’t it make sense to have a best of both worlds way of doing things? What I mean by this is a way to write low level RLP type code directly into your gadgeteer project and have the compiler compile it and handle all the relevant bits to enable using the RLP type code? After all the single biggest complaint I’ve seen in the Arduino Vs NETMF question is one of speed and realtime over interpreted. NETMF is awesome and really quick to get things done but when you need that extra boost it gets overly complicated. Maybe I’m wrong and this is a stupid idea, but the simpler ways of doing things are often the best.
Also MS really needs to invest some major moolah on .NETMF and I mean real money here. Marketing, MVP’s, Education, Publishing, Sponsorships, Events, Websites etc. They really need to get more manufacturers making hardware too. If that means subsidies or engineering help to port onto new SOC’s then do it. IoT is here to stay and MS need to pull their collective fingers out if they want to be a player.
Its time for them to Sh*t or get off the pot.
@ njbuch - This is great 
I didn’t realize this was as far ahead as it is. Great Job.
My wallet is going to get hurt.
I’ve seen market research from ARM that expects over the next five years, about two thirds (if I remember correctly) of all shipped processors will be microcontrollers. That’s where most of the IoT is happening, and NETMF is the [em]only[/em] MS offering in that space.
Inexpensive NETMF devices have the potential to be [em]the[/em] way for accessing the Microsoft cloud. After having (nearly?) missed the mobile revolution, I’d think they should not be too keen on missing IoT as well?
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We’re talking millions if not billions of microcontrollers here. The economics of it mean that if a company can save a few cents by going for a slightly cheaper and lower performance chip they will. While NETMF runs 100x slower than bare metal it does not stand a chance. This has nothing do with the price GHI charge for hobbiests to buy gadgeteet boards.
Here is the deal there are two camps here, Gadgeteer with sockets and everyone else (we’ll keep this to .NetMF for the moment). Gadgeteer is more then just sockets, its has the designer which is also a huge feature that I haven’t seen anywhere else. Now if Gadgeteer had a way where I could do my prototype and then submit the final design and get a single board with all my needed goodies on it (or at least connections as having a temperature chip on a shield does nothing for me if I want to put the temperature probe in the freezer and another on the outside for example) then the other .netMF platforms become moot and this is where I thought Gadgeteer was going at some point. Now of course the other platforms could also come up with something for the designer etc, but I think its unlikely as that was work that Microsoft ate so they could have the tool in house and given the development environment that Arduino has (after all these years), its unlikely the user community is willing to do the work themselves. Hardware and drivers the community is willing to do (and Gadgeteer will have more and better drivers over time), but IDE etc, maybe not, so Gadgeteer has a pretty good jump out of the gate now.
I often wondered about this. Is Gadgeteer pricing and quality geared to the hobbiest or is it geared more towards “business” uses?
I originally chose Gadgeteer for my business because it looked professionally done as well at the time of looking seemed, to be the only one supporting a good 7" screen. Being how it was backed by Microsoft, it also gave it some legitimacy when asking customers to replace PLC based hardware in order to expand functionality.
Not to take away from any of the other offerings such as MikroElectronika Arduino etc. Each have their own merits.
I guess I am asking which market(s) is Gadgeteer trying to serve and how serious is Microsoft about serving this market? While I haven’t the experience a lot of others have, there seems to be a general frustration about completeness of support.
@ hagster the price of the hardware becomes trivial compared to the cost of software development. Sure there are going to be billions of processors out there, but they won’t be running the same app, so you have to consider the number of chips that will be running each app and when you do that the price of the hardware isn’t such a big deal and a couple of cents per CPU is nothing if it makes the software development easier and hence cheaper. Now of course if you’re a hobbyist and only building one of’s then hardware costs matter, but billions of IoT devices won’t be from hobbyist and if your a commercial business then its your software costs that tend to eat your budget (note as a business it tends to be your software that differentiates you from your competitors, especially when there are only a handful of chip manufactures, so software is important).
True for commercial prototyping, false for large-scale commercial production, false for hobbyists (who don’t generally measure time as a cost).
Companies doing large-scale production will go to shocking lengths to shave fractions of a penny of cost per unit. If you’re only producing ten (or a hundred, or a thousand) units, and selling them at a large premium, then yeah, the hardware cost isn’t a big deal.
Well, that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? It’s not even as simple as two markets (hobbyist vs commercial), there are at least four that I can think of:
[ul]Short-run premium commercial product prototyping ← Gadgeteer in its current form fits this nice perfectly, IMO
Large-run consumer commercial product prototyping ← Gadgeteer doesn’t fit here, because NETMF doesn’t fit the product requirements
Hobbyist hardware/software tinkerer on a reasonable budget ← Gadgeteer doesn’t fit here, because it requires a large investment, and there are other, significantly cheaper options with much larger and more active communities
Hobbyist software tinkerer with a generous budget ← Perfect for Gadgeteer, with its emphasis on software only[/ul]
I also would like to point out that it’s not strictly true that “Gadgeteer will have more and better drivers over time”, for example, look at the Seeed modules that have no or non-working drivers. The Gadgeteer framework is a moving target, which requires continual investment to keep drivers up-to-date, and that investment isn’t guaranteed.
@ godefroi All good points. I agree with you about companies going to great lengths to save a cent or two. I once worked for a large alarm system manufacturer and they would spend hours finding ways to save one penny on systems because of their large volume.
I also agree with your assessment of the different markets. Gus’ question on the first post was the one I was most interested in.
I see in other posts that people are using Gadgeteer in commercial settings but I was curious as to what percentage of the 17,621 users in this forum do use it for commercial or is it too much in its infancy to do that.
I have to admit as per @ DukeNukem I was also attracted to Gadgeteer because I could freely download VS Express and NETMF and use a professional environment to develop my code.
What I wasnt prepared for was the amount of hunting I have to do to find information relevant to the most recent versions of either hardware or software. Now dont get me wrong, like any endeavour I know it takes work to understand but I guess I just expected it to be more organized.
My perspective is that software and QA are a huge cost that is often overlooked by manufacturing organizations because they count the wrong things. I worked on a project with a daily burn rate of $350,000 per day in development cost. Yes, that is 1/3 of a million dollars of engineering every day the project was delayed. Of course, that only applies to big research, big iron, automotive, and industries like that, but shaving pennies is negligible even at a million units a year compared to shaving days off the schedule. That is the industrial case.
For the hobbiest case, a “generous” budget for a Gadgeteer project might be $150 or more. Yes, maybe I could shave off $75 or more by using a cheaper mainboard solution. But this is the trap I fall into so often - I try to optimize cost, spending days or weeks of effort, to save a few dollars instead of getting the project done. Even in the case where I plan to make multiples, I do better by building “expensive” first runs - and then optimizing costs after the machine is running and generating good feedback.
For the hobbiest case, Gadgeteer is a BARGAIN! Compare the costs of buying every GHI mainboard and module available in the catalog to something like - I don’t know, maybe maintaining a boat for a year. Or going snow skiing for a weekend. Or keeping a high-end gaming computer up to date. Or owning any Apple products and upgrading to a newer model occasionally. Yep, you can get a heck of a well equipped Gadgeteer development system for the cost of an iPad.
That is one of the other traps I fall into - thinking certain things are expensive even if they cost less than other items that I thknk less about. It is easier for me to pop $100 on a new power drill than to buy a $40 Cerbot. Or to buy a $60 technical book than to buy a $25 Gadgeteer module.
It isn’t about the money: value = (Benefit + Emotion) / Cost
The more emotion added to the equation, the the higher the perceived value. Yes, reducing cost increases the value as well, but it also drives down R&D budgets. Adding benefit and emotion keeps value high while still providing income. The benefit of the VS development environment is huge for me. The Arduino Zero just now gets a debugger? I am happy for them. I am still years ahead with the tools we have.
There is the old joke about “Yes, we lose $0.50 on every unit, but we make it up on volume.”
To see the emotional component, simply consider the Apple vs. PC adds of years ago - Apple (Guy Kawasaki) knew the value equation and pushed the emotional component hard.