Top Five Reasons to Use Netduino

When working with Netduino, you can literally build hardware at the speed of software. Are you a C# .Net developer that wants to build connected solutions but you feel like you don’t have the knowledge you need to assemble and control hardware? Are you looking for a modern hardware platform that allows you to leverage your existing software skills? Then there’s no better hardware prototyping platform than Netduino.

Here are the top five reasons why we think Netduino is the go-to platform for building connected things:

Reason #1: Code in C# with .NET

Netduino runs the .NET Micro framework. This provides a core .NET API surface that is used to write the software that runs the hardware. This means you use the same coding techniques, the same methods and properties that you use with .NET app development.

Reason #2: Develop in Visual Studio

Use a modern IDE and leverage the features and tools built into Visual Studio for both Windows and macOS. Netduino solutions are developed using a mature, industry standard IDE and you have access to the same features that you use when developing software, including intellisense, code complete, refactoring and support for NuGet packages.

Reason #3: Modern Development Practices

Use the same development patterns for hardware that you would use for software. Use events to raise an alarm when a temperature sensor goes out of range, or respond to events raised by hardware inputs like buttons and switches. You can also use threads to ensure your hardware solution is able to respond to sensors while long running operations happen on another thread. Need to diagnose an issue or watch values change as your solution runs? The debugger allows to you set breakpoints, step through code, and watch variable values.

Reason #4: Feature-packed Hardware

The Netduino 3 comes with either an Ethernet connection or WiFi to easily connect to your network. Both Netduino 3s also include a microSD card slot allowing you to store large amounts of data locally such as sensor data, logs, pictures, etc. It also includes all of the IO features you’d expect on a hardware development platform. This includes general purpose IO ports that can accept both digital and analog inputs. And it has support for standard communication protocols including I2C, PWM, SPI and UART. This means you can choose from a huge selection of readily available hardware for your projects.

Reason #5: Driver Library

Wilderness Labs also developed the community supported Netduino.Foundation driver library, with a large selection of peripheral drivers that makes it easy to control hardware from your code. The core logic for each hardware driver is encapsulated and exposed in a simple, clean, modern API. Controlling hardware, like rotating a servo, setting a color on an RGB LED or taking a picture with a camera can be done can be done with in just a few lines of code.

For further proof of the power of Netduino development, check out these fantastic Hackster projects created by our growing community! And head to the Wilderness Labs website to get starting developing hardware with Netduino and Netduino.Foundation. There are also Getting Started guides, electronics tutorials, project samples and more. Build, automate, learn and be part of this exciting evolution of connected hardware.