The Austrian company AUG Elektronik GmbH will soon release its AUG AMI DevKit. The main features of the board include the following:
Atmel AT91SAM9261 (200 MHz)
160 kB SRAM
64 MB SDRAM
256 MB NAND Flash
3.4" OLED Display 480x272, 24 BPP RGB
resistive Touch Screen (SPI)
4 serial Ports (2 RS-232, 1 RS-485, 1 Debug RS-232)
10/100 MBit Ethernet Auto-MDI
I2C Bus
SPI Bus
battery backed Realtime Clock (I2C)
several (15) free GPIOs (more depend on use of other peripherals)
single 5 V power supply
QProx capacitive sensor keypad (16 keys, I2C)
Temperature sensor TI TMP100 on board
110 mm x 65 mm x 28 mm
102 g incl. Ethernet and 3.4" OLED display
Serial or Ethernet deploying and debugging
On board (supported by hardware) but not yet supported by software/port are Micro SD-Card Slot and USB Host / USB Device.
I know they will provide a SDK with managed drivers for all the components mentioned above and an interesting emulator for the AMI DevKit that even support the QProx capacitive sensor keypad and temperature sensor.
Had a session to indroduce the .NET Micro Framework at the first German Embedded Software Congress (ESE) today. The audience consists of traditional embedded programmers using C++, C or even assembler. The interesting question at the beginning of the presentation for me was how much people of the 40 attendees have ever heard about the .NET Micro Framework before. There where 4 out of 40 hands up, so 10% ever heard about it. The second question was how much have ever downloaded the SDK/VS and messed around with it. There was only one raised hand, but this was Frank Prengel from Microsoft. So zero percent of the traditional embedded programmers had have a practical look at the .NET Micro Framework. I think there is potential to improve this.
The very interesting question I forgot to ask: How much people will download the .NET Micro Framework SDK after my session.
Upon a customers request I figured out how to use the .NET Micro Framework Emulator on a clear machine without Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Micro Framework SDK 3.0 installed.
Imagine a scenario where you might need to send your device application to someone for demonstration that does not have any MF hardware (because you are in the prototype phase and there is no final hardware yet) and he also is not a programmer having Visual Studio and the MF SDK installed.
The .NET Micro Framework Emulator is in generally a Winforms .NET application. Unfortuately it references one .NET 3.5 assembly, so the target machine should have at least the .NET Framework 3.5. installed. Just copying the emulator executable would not work because you have to tell the emulator via command line arguments what device assemblies it shall load. That´s what Visual Studio actually does when launching an emulator.
As an example we want to give away the NewPresentationSample application on the Microsoft Sample Emulator.
Therefore copy the files Microsoft.SPOT.CLR.dll, Microsoft.SPOT.Emulator.dll, Microsoft.SPOT.Emulator.Interface.dll, Microsoft.SPOT.Emulator.Sample.SampleEmulator.exe and Microsoft.SPOT.Emulator.Sample.SampleEmulator.exe.emulatorconfig from the Tools directoy of the MF SDK to a new separate directory. Further copy the following system assemblies from the Assemblies directory of the MF SDK to the same directory as your emulator: mscorlib.pe, Microsoft.SPOT.Hardware.pe, Microsoft.SPOT.Native.pe, Microsoft.SPOT.Graphics.pe, and Microsoft.SPOT.TinyCore.pe. Finally copy the application NewPresentation.pe. Yes you need the .pe files and not .dll files since .pe files are the MF specific assemblies derived from the dlls.
To launch the emulator with the command line arguments we need to create a batch file with the following content:
"Microsoft.SPOT.Emulator.Sample.SampleEmulator.exe" "/load:NewPresentation.pe" "/load:mscorlib.pe" "/load:Microsoft.SPOT.Native.pe" "/load:Microsoft.SPOT.Graphics.pe" "/load:Microsoft.SPOT.Hardware.pe" "/load:Microsoft.SPOT.TinyCore.pe"
Which assemblies need to be loaded you can see in the Debug Output Window of Visual Studio.
Now you can demo your device application everywhere.
(Thanks to Andreas for testing in your machine parc).