Burning Fingers with the .NET Micro Framework

Spent some of today soldering. I’m not as good at it as I used to be. Or perhaps things have got smaller. Either way, I was very pleased to see a red LED flashing at the end of my efforts. It meant that I hadn’t destroyed the power regulator chip.

I was soldering pins into one of these. They are a very neat connector that take Xbee radio devices and allow them to fit onto standard plugboards. We are using these as part of our Dare To Dream Different competition entry and we want to connect some sensors.

Having carefully soldered around 20 pins I then discovered that I only actually needed to connect to around four of them. Oh well, I suppose the practice was good for me.

Clusty to the Rescue

I’ve spent bits of today trying to get my .NET Micro Framework devices to work. For some reason I want to take my smallest PC away with me next week to Portugal, and this has meant a certain amount of heartache.

The PC is an Advent netbook. I bought it earlier this year and I love it to bits. It arrived running Windows XP, and I’ve just put the beta version of Windows 7 on it. This turned out to be really easy. I just plugged in an external DVD drive, tweaked the BIOS to make it boot from the DVD and then booted from the Windows 7 disk. I did a brand new install, wiping out the original operating system and, of course, removing the recovery partition. I don’t do things by halves, me.

The installation was smooth and surprisingly quick. The only problem was that I had to find my way to the RealTek site to locate and install the WIFI drivers, but once I did that I had the machine on the campus network with very little fuss.

That was a week ago. Since then I’ve installed Microsoft Office 2007, Visual Studios 2005 and 2008, Photoshop Elements and a bunch of other programs, all of which seem to work fine. Unfortunately, when I tried to install the USB drivers for some of my .NET Micro Framework devices, things started to get a little tricky.

The drivers that were supplied with the hardware didn’t work. I read somewhere that Windows 7 refuses to install drivers that have not been signed, and so I did some digging and found that there is magic that is supposed to switch this off.

Unfortunately it didn’t seem to work for me. I did a lot more digging and kept hitting brick walls, trying increasingly more complex searches for the drivers that it seemed like I needed and not finding anything. By lunchtime I’d resigned myself to taking my heavy old Toshiba away with me.

Then I remembered Clusty. This is a clustering search engine that I’ve used in the past to good effect.  You get your search results nicely categorised, which makes finding your way through them must easier.  I fed in the same search string that I’d been using unsuccessfully on Google and it came back with a list of hits that made it very easy to find just what I wanted. And it worked. So it looks like I’ll be writing code for tiny devices on a tiny device, which I guess is just how it should be.

DevDays 09 in Portugal

I’m off to Portugal next week. I’m doing a session at DevDays 09 about the .NET Micro Framework. If you happen to be in Lisbon next week it would be great to see you.

First Open Day

We had our first Open Day of the season today. We had a good turnout and I managed to get through my part of the proceedings without actually falling over, which is always good. And of course we gave away a prize.

Head of department Warren (on the right) hands out the PSP 300 to Francis.

If you came along to see us, thank you, I hope you found the visit worthwhile.

I M Wright Speaks

You’ve probably heard me go on about I M Wright before. He is the “Microsoft Development Manager at Large” alter ego of Eric Brechner. He wrote the book Hard Code, which is a wonderful look at how to create software properly. He also has a blog which is brilliant. And now he has a podcast too, so you can listen to the good word rather than have to read it. You can find the file here.