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Netduino Go is designed for much more than toy projects, but one has to recognize that toy projects are fun and also great learning experiences. Today, I want to take you through the process of reproducing the behavior of a famous toy that you will surely recognize. That toy, that has helped many of us realize what poor motor skills we possess, has two knobs that control the horizontal and vertical coordinates of a pen that draws into the dust on the back of a simple screen. It’s a great mechanical device that is part of western culture. Our version will use two potentiometers , a 320x240 LCD display , a button to erase the screen, and of course a Netduino Go . The hardware setup looks like the following: We connected the button to port 2 (but...

Wouldn’t it be great if you could build your own stuff? Microcontrollers let you do that, but they usually require dealing with a lot of complexity and unknowns. If you’re a software developer, chances are you don’t really know how to use a capacitor, or how a transistor works, even though it is at the heart of all computers. Well there is a way now to develop awesome hardware projects without knowledge of electronics, just by connecting modules together. Netduino Go is a platform that allows for that without constraining the types of projects you can build. Today the number of available modules is still limited (the platform was released only last Wednesday), but it is expected to grow fast. In this post, I’ll introduce you to the platform...

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you may have noticed the electronics posts lately. With my friend Fabien , we've been building a little handheld console from readily available parts. It's also programmable in C#, using a library that we built . It's great fun really. Our plan is to build a kit and a book out of it, to help people learn the basics of digital electronics and C# programming. We've built a site for the project over a few nights last week, using Orchard and hosting on Azure . I thought I'd throw in a little return on experience and talk about the modules we used. The site can be found here: http://www.pix6t4.com The first thing I did to build the site was to build the theme. I started from the built...