.NET Hacker Room at Code Impact

If you haven’t done so yet, you should register for Code Impact up in Jacksonville on September 13th.

I’ll be hosting a new tradition in FL Code Camps a .NET Hacker Room.  A .NET Hacker Room is a unique experience that will allow you to see and play with some of the latest hardware technology.  

This room will offer things like
- Internet of Things
- 3D Printers
- Quad Copters
- Windows Galileo
- Robots
- Netduino's
- Oculas Rift (V2)
- More!

Also throughout the day, come in for 10-15 minute lightening talks on the above topics.

See you there!

-twb

NiVek QC Milestone - .NET Microframeworks

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

QuadCopter with Win8 Flight Console Talk

On August 27, 2013, I presented NiVek QC with a Windows 8 Flight Console to the Tampa Bay Robotics and Microcontroller Group.

As promised here are the materials and links.

Mounts were 3D Printed with my Afinia H-Series 3D Printer, but the Arms where from this FlameWheel kit.

Although the Windows 8 Console was built with Visual Studio .NET premium, Windows 8 Apps can be built with VS Express editions that can be downloaded for free.

The .NET equivalent to the Arudino, programmable in C# is the Netduino, they are pretty cheap and easy to get started with.  If you’re a .NET programmer and want to get started playing with hardware, this is a great place to start!

A great source of information and forums is located at the DIY Drones web site.  In addition parts and supplies can be purchased from the 3D Robotics store, I generally get most of my parts from Hobby King (they have a USA warehouse, otherwise shipping from Hong Kong is a week or two.

Finally if you don’t want to start from scratch and spend countless hours and probably thousands of dollars on parts, there are some off the shelf quad copters I can recommend.  The AR Drone 2 is a lot more than I had expected, it’s actually some very serious hardware.  You need to get some additional parts like Motors, ECS’s and a frame, but for a flight controller, you can pickup an Ardupilot APM for relatively cheap.  The firmware can be customized relatively easy.

Hope this gets you going and be sure to let me know if you get something up in the air (or have some awesome crashes in the process).

-twb