Last month NiVek took to the sky in controlled flight (more or less) and was a major milestone in my one and one-half year journey back into microelectronics and flying robots :)
Over the past couple weeks I’ve been focusing on the software side of things and achieved a couple of additional milestones. As of last weekend I was successfully communicating and configuring NiVek through the Windows 8 flight console using WinUSB. This weekend I completed a port of the .NET Microframeworks onto the NiVek hardware.
I need to give credit to the Netduino folks for publishing their source code that helped this process considerably. I created a custom USB stack that works with the driverless WinUSB model that’s available on Windows 8.0 and have my code running on .NET Microframeworks 4.3. At some point, I might organize my code to provide some updates for the Netduino 2 products that are still on .NET MF 4.2.
As a mobile/cloud/client/embedded developer, I see the .NET Microframeworks as an enabler for creating small/cheap smart devices that can easily be customized to work with the cloud. In fact, another project I have on the drawing boards right now is a programmable zone controller for our HVAC system that will be programmable with NETMF.
So what’s next for NiVek? My final task before I have the products frameworks completed is to get the Windows Phone 8 app to a point where it can be used to fly the copter. At that point the goals for V1.0 have been completed.
-twb
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