I saw this Kickstarter today - Meadow: Full-stack .NET Standard IoT platform. It says that "It combines the best of all worlds; it has the power of RaspberryPi, the computing factor of an Arduino, and the manageability of a mobile app. And best part? It runs full .NET Standard on real IoT hardware."
NOTE: I don't have any relationship with the company/people behind this Kickstarter, but it seems interesting so I'm sharing it with you. As with all Kickstarters, it's not a pre-order, it's an investment that may not pan out, so always be prepared to lose your investment. I lost mine with the .NET "Agent" SmartWatch even though all signs pointed to success.
I've done IoT work on Raspberry Pis which is much easier lately with the emerging community support for ARM32, Raspberry Pis, and cool stuff happening on Windows 10 IoT. I've written on how easy it is to get running on Raspberry Pi. I was even able to get my own podcast website running on Raspberry Pi and in Docker.
This Meadow Kickstarter says it's running on the Mono Runtime and will support the .NET Standard 2.0 API. That means that you likely already know how to program to it. Most libraries on NuGet are .NET Standard compliant so a ton of open source software should "Just Work" on any solution that supports .NET Standard.
One thing that seems interesting about Meadow is this sentence: "The power of Raspberry Pi in the computing factor of an Arduino, and the manageability of a mobile app."
Raspberry Pis are full-on computers. Ardunios are small little (mostly) single-tasked devices. Microcomputer vs Microcontroller. It's overkill to have Ubuntu on a computer just to turn on a device. You usually want IoT devices to have as small a surface area as possible.
Meadow says "Meadow has been designed to run on a variety of microcontrollers, and our first board is based on STMicroelectronics' flagship STM32F7 MCU. The Meadow F7 Micro board is an embeddable module that's based on Adafruit Feather form factor." Remember, we are talking megs not gigs here. "We've paired the STM32F7 with 32MB of flash storage and 16MB of RAM, so you can run pretty much anything you can think of building." This is just a 216MHz ARM board.
Be sure to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page as they outline risks as well as what's left to be done.
What do you think? While you are at it, check out (total coincidence) our sponsor this week is Intel IoT! They have some great developer kits.
Sponsor: Reduce time to market and simplify IOT development using developer kits built on Intel Atom®, Intel® Core™ and Intel® Xeon® processors and tools such as Intel® System Studio and Arduino Create*
© 2018 Scott Hanselman. All rights reserved.
