01:From Work to the .Net Micro Framework

Friday, 9 July 2010

I’ve been toying with the idea of creating a weekly blog entry on my site for some time now. Today, I will post the first of what I hope to become at least weekly entries. The idea being to share some what I have learnt in this week and possibly inspire, entertain or just be interesting.

@Work:

Architecture

I’m still battling through the Architecture roles. In a company that has traditionally worked on smaller projects where the client requirements and the functional specs were done during 1 meeting with the client after which the project was delivered, the concept of an Architect has not quite hit home yet. Because leadership i the company argue that we don’t need a technical design phase because they gave us the functional spec, now working on larger and larger enterprise applications, my days are interesting.

SDLC

I am still in the process of creating and implementing an actual Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). It’s an uphill battle at best. It’s just so logical that I battle with the concept that they are not just adopting the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) right away.

Acquisitions

The recent acquisition of our company has also complicated things a little since we need to see what the new guys have in place (if anything) before we can effectively continue what we are busy with.

@Home

.Net Micro Framework

Take a look at a project called Shrediquette. This project by a guy named William Bremen, is a Micro controller based Tri-Copter. Have a look at the video “Tricopter – The Movie...” on his site. It has 3 Gyroscopes and an accelerometer onboard which is used by the Micro Controller to stabilise the tri-copter during flight. This thing is even strong enough to carry a small camera for those aerial shots you have been dreaming of since you can remember (Well me anyway)

Anyway, Shrediquette is based on an Arduino controller which is coded in Basic. I will be replacing this with a FEZ Domino board which is a .Net Micro Framework board which you can code in C# express (free). I’ve raised a discussion point on the .Net Micro Framework Community site and the guys maintain that even though it would run via the .Net Common Language Runtime, it would be fast enough to deal with Shrediquette.

Now if I could just finish my Target Acquisition and Tracking system (My current project) I could move on to Shrediquette. I Basically just need to assemble it. Initial Software is written and hardware has been tested in isolation.