This post illustrates how you can control Servo Motors from .NET MicroFramework using only simple output pins and C# code.

I have this idea of making a walking robot, so in order to test the basic servo control from .NET MicroFramework, I have used 2 servo motors and built a leg. Each Servo motor controls a joint in a leg .

You can start out with a look at the short video on YouTube that I made to show the leg moving.

 

This post illustrates how you can control a unipolar stepper motor from .NET MicroFramework using very simple hardware.

The motor which I have scavenged from an old 5 1/4" floppy disk drive (do you remember those?) is controlled by a dedicated Stepper Motor control class written in C#.

You can start out with a look at the short video on YouTube that I made to show the motor running:

Today (31^th December 2009) it is exactly 1 year ago I registered the domain name microframework.dk

The reason why I did that was to have a place to blog about the world of my .NET MicroFramework discoverings especially in relation to the Microsoft Dare to Dream Different contest, which I at that time hoped to be part of. Luckily my entry was accepted as one to move on to round 2, but that was as far as it went. I had a great time developing my project (HACS - House Access Control System with fun doorbell, which you can read about in another article).

Time has shown that I did not find all the time to blog as much as I wanted to do, so I have not released as many articles as I had hoped. But that does not mean that I have not been working with the .NET MicroFramework!

In order to let you see some of what I have been doing (and maybe what will come) I will today on the last day of the year, release 2 videos illustrating that the MF can really control motors. One video shows the control of a Stepper Motor and the other video shows the control of 2 Servo Motors. For now the articles are meant as a teaser, so stay tuned to see more.

Happy Birthday to microframework.dk and Happy New Year to everyone else

Peter

Hey! If you have been waiting to see the videos of the projects submitted to the Microsoft Dare To Dream Different Contest, then wait no more.

The .NET Micro Framework Team at Microsoft has now released all the submitted contest videos on YouTube. I have not yet counted the number of videos, so I can't tell you for sure that they are all there, but you can go have a look for yourself. Funny enough, Microsoft has not yet made any announcement about this, so maybe they are not finished uploading...

All videos are named like "Dare To Dream Different Contest - <project name>", so it should be easy to make a search for the videos. You can also use the link shown above, where I have setup a search criteria for you. Click and try!

I now know what I'm going to do tonight - it's video time!

Peter

Tuesday, August 25, the Dare To Dream Contest winners was published on the NETMF Team Blog.

Congratulations to the finalists and the winners. I'm looking forward to see your project videos.

Peter

I regularly receive a number of comments, questions and requests for my blog, and instead of answering each of them one at a time I will try to cover some of the recurring issues you ask or comment.

When you comment

Some comments are regular SPAM and I try to keep that out of the system, but sometimes it can be a little hard to see if a comment is really a comment to something I have written or just a waste of time. Please make your comments as clear as possible and add a real link to a website and email of yours! I welcome statements about projects and articles, but if you don't like the looks of my blog, then I don't need to hear about it. I will change it if I feel for it - not because you tell me to!

If you comment - please add your real name at the end of your post. That way is is more personal and I can see there is a real human at the other end.

The language 

The language on this site is English and there will not be a translated version into any other language. I try my best to write in a way so that it is understandable, but as my native language is Danish there is no guarantee for my English. If I write something that can offend somebody, then please accept my appologies as that is never intentional.

Why am I doing this? 

I maintain this blog because I want to give back something to the .NET Micro Framework community. I don't make money on this, it cost me money and quite a lot of time, but I personally learn a lot from other peoples web sites, so this is my way of paying back.

Sponsors

In case there are any companies who would like to sponsor some hardware then I will receive this with open arms. There are quite a number of nice development boards and other hardware stuff out there. If I receive something from you, I will try to make use of it in a project and write and article for this blog. I will be happy to mention your company name in the article. This way I hope it can be a win-win situation for both of us. If you are interested, then please write me an email.

Blog engine

For those interested in knowing which blog engine I use then I use "BlogEngine.NET" and I have modified the standard "StableStart" theme. It had to be easy to install and maintain and I don't need too much fancy stuff you see on some blog engines. It stores data in XML files, so it can be run on any server that support windows and .NET.

Site Statistics

My site seems to be more popular than I expected it would be as I receive around 50 unique guests each day. Some days it even goes above 100 - this is great :-) I know that many of you are returning guests and that I don't get 50 new visitors each day - if that was the case, then I'm sure we would see a lot more web sites about the micro framework. That would be cool though.

Guest posts

I do not accept guest posts because I simply do not have time to manage this.

Writing for others

Some of you ask me if I want to write articles for you, but the answer is no. I thank you for your request but I just don't have time to write for others!
Time is a scarce ressource and I have trouble even to find time to write articles for this blog. I have a pipeline of articles to write for this blog but as long as there is only 24 hours per day and I must share this between my family, my job, my blog, my programming interests and all my other interests, then I run out of time. Oh, and I also need to sleep...

Take care. Keep sending comments to my posts.

Peter

My project: HACS - House Access Control System with fun doorbell, didn't make it to the final in the Microsoft Dare To Dream Different competition :-(

But hey - I'm a winner anyway :-). I did get a Device Solutions Tahoo-II development board for free - that is, if I don't count all the hours spent into developing this project. I learned a lot about the Micro Framework for embedded programming in C# directly on hardware,  and this is where the potential is and the real fun lies.

Furthermore, GHI Electronics LLC, who makes a lot of nice Micro Framework products, decided to donate 100 coupons for shopping in their webshop to all round 2 contestants in the competition - this is really generous of them - and I can now claim my 100 USD coupon and go shopping in the GHI shop. Wow, I'm not sure if I can limit my shopping to these 100 USD. They have so many nice boards that I think I have to spend some more money... Time will tell. Their new ChipworkX development system looks like a killer, but also the USBizi and the Embedded master boards are very attractive. A big thanks to GHI for this donation.

Round 2 Finalists.

I must congratulate the authors of the 10 projects which made it to the finals :-). You can see a list of their names on the Dream Different contest page. I'm really looking forward to see the videos of these projects. I hope that Microsoft will make all the project videos publicly available, as they have promised earlier. It is always very educational to see what other people create and how they choose to implement it.

Peter

I have made a list of links to the Dare To Dream Different competition videos people have made public on the net. You can find it in my page list or click here.

If you are a competitor in this competition and have a video of your project, you are welcome to write me where I can find your video. Then I will add it to the list.

Peter

This is the video presentation I submitted for round 2 of the Microsoft "Dare To Dream Different" competition.

The main functions of the system are:

• Guard dog barks when guests arrive at the door. Activated by movement detected by a PIR sensor.
• Doorbell playing different individual tunes, stored as MP3 files on USB memory stick. Using VMUSIC2 MP3 player module.
• Door access control with electronic door lock and door open/close sensor.
• Door access can be controlled remote by sending SMS to the system from a mobile phone. Using a GSM modem.
• Door alarms are sent as SMS to predefined mobile phone number.
• Guest can write a SMS message which is sent to a predefined mobile phone number.

Unfortunately some parts of the video is a little dark, but I hope that you can see it anyway.

As the length of the video for the competition could not be more than 10 minutes, I ran out of time to show all features in the system. Maybe I will add more video clips of this later.

I have just succeeded in uploading my video presentation of my project for the Microsoft competition :-)

I was just about to believe that I had problems as in the initial papers about the videofile formats it was stated that we could only submit files less than 50MB! I could not get my video file this small and still keep a good quality of the video.

Then I just tried to log in to the upload site, and luckily they had changed the max. filesize to 100MB. OK, I had to try the upload two times, as after 15 minutes of upload, I was notified of an error in one of the text fields on the submission form. I corrected the error and as I didn't know if my first upload was successful, I had to try again. Now 15 minutes later again, I was forwarded to the "success" screen (You can see it here: http://dreamdifferentcontest.com/thanks.aspx )

Now it is time to get some sleep...

By the way - my project is titled "House Access Control System" and is as the title states an access control system but it also has a really nice enhanced personal doorbell functionality, playing MP3 tunes.

This was great fun, now I just wait and see if I make it to the final.

Peter