Device Solutions

There have been a couple of cool demos made using the Tahoe and accelerometer board as a remote control.

Check out what Pavel Bansky did with Zigbee and the Tahoe to control a robot.  He has also documented his work connecting up the Zigbee module here.

Jens Kuhner also has a post about a project Hans Skytt Steffensen from the Centre for Software Innovation did to control a (toy) container terminal crane using a Tahoe, accelerometer and a wireless link.

If you live in North America, you can now buy our products from Arrow Electronics via their ArrowDevTools web site.

In the UK, we are pleased to announce Sytech Designs are stocking our products.

Of course, we still have our on-line store for those of you who live in the rest of the world!

It’s official - the .NET Micro Framework Team Blog has the list of the new features in V3.0 of the .NET Micro Framework.

There will be a public beta later in the “Summer” (or Winter for those of you who live in the same half of the world as I do!). 

We will be working to get as many of these feaures working on Tahoe as we can, and you can help!  Let us know which features are important to you and why!  Leave a comment below, or sign up to beta test new features when they are released. 

…if you can solve this puzzle!

http://blogs.msdn.com/netmfteam/archive/2008/06/04/guess-what-s-new-in-net-mf-3-0-and-win-jens-book.aspx

Microsoft will be announcing the features for real on Friday at Tech-Ed in Orlando.

Which features would you like to see on future products from us?

A few people have had some troubles communicating with the Tahoe over USB.  The culprit in every case to date as been power.   The short story is that you need to make sure you connect directly to your PC, and not through a hub.

When we orignally designed the Tahoe, we intended to power it from a plug-pack.  Later, we found that it ran fine off the USB power, and was well within the spec while doing so.   Using USB made the product a whole lot nicer to use, as well as build and ship.

The catch is that you need to plug directly into your PC (or laptop), and NOT through an unpowered hub.  We have also found that some laptops do not supply power according to the USB standard, but this seems to be a rare occurance.

So, if you are having trouble with USB comms - make sure you don’t have a hub connected, or try a desktop PC.

Pavel Bánský has an excellent post on how to control servos from the .NET Micro Framework.  It has sample code and a video!

The Ethernet add-on board for Tahoe is available!  You can buy it online here.

Once you have the board, Microsoft has some great articles on the .NET Micro Framework home page covering sockets programming and DPWS. 

Now that we have Ethernet support, we are investigating adding WiFi support also.  Is this something that would be useful (or essential?) for your project?   Comment away… 

We ship our products from New Zealand, and I know this immediately raises the question: “how much will it cost me in shipping to <insert your country here>”.   The best way to find out is to go part way through the order process.  Add the products you a thinking about buying to the cart, and press the “Checkout” button.  On the next screen (Delivery Details), you can change the country, and scroll down to see the total cost of the order!

In case you were wondering - here is everything you ever wanted to know about Eketahuna!

We have just updated the shop site to take orders for the Ethernet add-on board.

We have done this so you can take advantage of the special pricing on Tahoe ($299) which is valid until the end of April (yes, that is 2 days away).   All orders that include an Ethernet board will be shipped when this is available (on or before 9 May).

There has been quite a lot of confusion around the “evaluation” version of the 2.5 firmware.  We have a new version of the firmware available now that removes this limitation.  Get it from the download page now!