Netduino.Foundation – Device Drivers for Netduino
Saturday, February 10th, 2018
Netduino Foundation Banner
It has been a very busy few months both in and out of work as evidenced by the silence here. The last few months has seen a fair amount to time spent working with the Netduino boards developing documentation and libraries.
I was given a Nedtuino board in 2010 as a present and I have never looked back. The orignal Netduino Plus was upgraded to the Netduino Plus 2, the Netduino WiFi and numerous electronics projects have come about all due to that original present.
The attraction of the Netduino is the fact that you can work in C# with Visual Studio. Another big selling point is Visual Studio and the powerful debugging features available to the developer.
In summary, it’s a great prototyping and test environment. If I ever have a problem and want to test a theory quickly I always fall back to these boards.
Netduino.Foundation
One difficulty with Netduino was it was sometimes difficult to find drivers for sensors, displays etc. Support for devices relied upon community members having written a driver and making the source available. In fairness, many community members did just that.
Wilderness Labs have recently taken ownership of the Netduino brand and technology. A new approach has brought some innovations:
- Support for Visual Studio for Mac
- New community forum
- Developer documentation for the Netduino
- Electronics tutorials
- Netduino.Foundtion collection of drivers and core functionality
- Source code is available on GitHub
- Nuget support
It is still possible to use the Netduino without using Netduino.Foundtion but the library makes a number of tasks easier and quicker.
As well as a number of core peripherals there is support for a library of drivers covering a variety of devices:
| Device | Description |
|---|---|
| 74595 Shift Registers | Everyones favourite output expander |
| AT24Cxx | I2C EEPROM |
| DS323x | Real time clock |
| Graphics Library | General purpose graphics library |
| LCD | MicroLiquidCrystal library for 16×2 and 20×4 LCD displays |
| Serial LCD | Serial LCD backpack |
| SSD1306 | OLED Display (128×32 and 128×64) |
| BME280 | Temperature, pressure and humidity |
| HIH6130 | Temperature and humidity |
| MPL115A2 | Temperature and pressure |
| MPL3115A2 | Temperature and pressue |
| SHT31D | Temperature and humidity |
| SI7021 | Temperature and humidity |
| TMP102 | Temperature |
| GPS | NMEA GPS |
| ALS-PT19 | Analog light sensor |
| TSL2561 | Infra-red compensated light sensor |
| ADXL335 | Triple axis accelerometer (+/- 3g) |
| ADXL345 | Triple axis accelerometer (+/- 16g) |
| MAG3110 | Triple axis magnetometer |
| PIR | Motion detection |
| Servo | Generic servo library |
| Analog Temperature | Analog temperature sensors such as LM35/36/37 etc. |
All of the drivers are supplied with source code, sample applications and comprehensive documentation.
Conclusion
It is great to see the Netduino with a new supporter. The new documentation and libraries make the platform easier to use.
