Netduino Gets A Huge Upgrade

The Netduino, a dev board built around the .NET Micro framework with the goal of being compatible with Arduino shields just got a huge upgrade.

The new Netduino Plus 2 features an upgraded STM32 ARM Cortex-M4 uC running at 168 MHz, improving on the original Netduino’s ARM7 running at 47 MHz. In addition to some more processing power, the STM32-based microcontroller has twice the RAM and six times as much Flash memory. Also, Ethernet (10Mbps), a MicroSD card port, and of course compatibility with all Arduino shields – including the new Arduino ‘Revision C’ boards for the Leonardo – remains intact.

In keeping with the design goals of the Netduino, the new board uses the .NET Micro Framework running under Windows. It looks like OS X and Linux users won’t be left out in the cold for long, though; there’s a project to port the .NET Micro stuff over to Mono.

Tip ‘o the hat to [Jason] for sending this one in.

12 thoughts on “Netduino Gets A Huge Upgrade

    1. Good point. It looks like it’s $15 more expensive, but way more powerful – and it has Ethernet and an SD slot!

      Kind of strange that the STM32F4 has 100M Ethernet hardware inside it, but they’re using the 10M SPI Microchip ENC28J60 instead!

      I’ll try and make some time to port the Espruino JavaScript interpreter over to it – it would be awesome to have it on an ethernet-enabled board.

      1. The STM32f4 has an ethernet MAC integrated, sure, but no PHY. So you’ll need an external PHY chip, which can be more complex to set up (and even maybe more expensive) than an ENC chip.

        Given the fact that you might rarely need to process more than 1MBps on such limited hardware, it can make sense.

      2. To add to what makapuf said, the ENC28J60 is basically a network coprocessor with onboard RAM buffers. Because of this we can dedicate more RAM and CPU cycles to the user’s application.

        An added bonus is that ENC28J60 is a lot easier to get up and running for native c/c++ hackers who want to use Netduino Plus 2 as a powerful native code devboard.

        We put a power FET on the ENC28J60 chip too. So if you don’t need it you can simply turn it off and save the power.

        Chris
        Secret Labs

    1. so true bro. Personally I’m annoyed the .net is trying to nudge into the embedded world.

      I think this is one of those things that if we just ignore it and keeping making our stuff without ever touching/speaking/thinking about .net, it will just go away.

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