Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer…

Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer is an open-source toolkit for building small electronic devices using the .NET Micro Framework and Visual Studio/Visual C# Express. Build all manner of electronic gadgets quickly and easily with .NET Gadgeteer.

.NET Micro Framework is an open source platform that expands the power and versatility of .NET to the world of small embedded applications. Desktop programmers can harness their existing .NET knowledge base to bring complex embedded concepts to market on time (and under budget). Embedded Developers can tap into the massive productivity gains that have been seen on the Desktop.

An open source and open hardware community project
If you’re building projects with .NET Gadgeteer, you’ll find a wealth of inspiration on this site. If you’re interested in building .NET Gadgeteer hardware, you can find hardware interface specifications and core libraries at http://gadgeteer.codeplex.com.  A variety of hardware vendors are building components for .NET Gadgeteer, so you’ll have a huge assortment of modules to choose from.

The .NET Gadgeteer source code is subject to the Apache License, version 2.0. In addition to the source code that we make available here, we also include hardware specifications and designs under a Creative Commons license. Each of these is governed by their respective licenses.

We are getting lots of emails about this – it’s unclear if it’s actually open source hardware (please correct us if we’re wrong, it’s a little confusing).

We have an email out to Microsoft to clarify if the files are available and where.

Regardless, it’s good to see more dev boards getting out there and more parts being opened up. We hope this is like the netduino and is a completely open source hardware project as well… The age of open low cost dev boards continues to play out.

Update: From the comments: ““This quote from Gus@GHI: All FEZ boards are open source so far. As for FEZ Spider, I do not see why not, but GHI is still clearing out some final details before release or doing anything in that area.””

EricH in the comments also says “The boards aren’t generally available until 9/30 (you can preorder now), so I’m assuming from that comment they are getting all their ducks in a row before publishing the files.”

Make sense, this is good to see!

Update: Note from Microsoft:

Hi Phillip

Thanks for your email and your interest in .NET Gadgeteer. You’re right that we don’t _yet_ have any schematics or board layouts online. Doing this is a key part of what we mean by being ‘open’ but we were so busy at OSCON and Maker Faire over the last week that it’s taking us a few days longer than we’d hoped to make everything available.

I saw your post at http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2011/08/03/microsoft-net-gadgeteer-open-hardware/, and to specifically reply to the questions raised there:

* Our intention is that the .NET Gadgeteer platform is open for anybody to build hardware and software that works with it. We are publishing all the stuff we’ve created for .NET Gadgeteer – source code, interface specifications, reference hardware designs, example projects – to enable that. Not everything is on the website yet, please bear with us – it’ll be up very soon at http://gadgeteer.codeplex.com !

* We are using the Apache 2.0 and Creative Commons-BY licenses depending on the type of artefact being published (software under Apache 2.0).

* We are hosting a central repository (http://gadgeteer.codeplex.com/) for open hardware designs and open source software compatible with .NET Gadgeteer. We will post the schematics and layouts of our reference designs there and hope that others will follow our lead. The decision about publishing HW designs for boards made by others rests with the companies/individuals who created them – we don’t want to mandate anything but rather give people as many options as possible.

If you think this information will be useful to others please feel free to share it/update your blog entry… Apologies about the ambiguity. When we have our designs up we’ll also review the text on our website to try and make sure we’re really clear about what we’re trying to do. But in the meantime please do let us know if you have any other questions – as you can imagine we’ve been really close to this for quite some time and it’s great to get input from some different perspectives.

Thanks and kind regards,

Steve (and the Gadgeteer team)

Here is our follow up!

is the .net runtime going to be open sourced?

for example, what is the time table for these three layers:

1. hardware (schematics/board layout)
2. firmware (.NET RTOS/runtime that is programmed into ARM chip)
3. software (API and interface for all the accessories)

thanks!