[TriEmbed] (POE) Ethernet microcontroller

[Jon Wolfe]

I consider myself a .net/c# aficionado,  but you do have to be very cautious with the .Net micro framework.  Much, much more so than on workstations,  there is a hefty resource and performance tax. There are a lot of tradeoffs,  you get a huge library,  and debugging ability over serial lines,  with a much less arcane language than c++. But the .net micro fw is intepreted unlike its big brother, and also uses non-compacting garbage collection (if I remember correctly), which can be very problematic for long running applications. 

On the other hand,  if you're writing something that is not performance critical,  it is really nice to be able to write, for example:

DateTime start = DateTime.Now;

(I believe, depending on what model you get, that many .net micro boards also come with the tcp stacks that do all the heavy lifting)

Than to have to scour a datasheet figuring out how to talk to an rtc over i2c.

<div>-------- Original message --------</div><div>From: Glen Smith <mrglenasmith at gmail.com> </div><div>Date:03/11/2014  8:26 AM  (GMT-05:00) </div><div>To: TriEmbed Discussion <triembed at triembed.org> </div><div>Subject: [TriEmbed] (POE) Ethernet microcontroller </div><div>
</div>I forgot to ask last night during the meeting: Does anyone know of an easy to use POE micro? I know that there is the POE Arduino, I have heard that by the time the TCPIP stuff gets implemented there is very little memory space for code. Is there a workaround for this or am I misinformed? The other problem with this is the cost - $80 seems steep compared to the $39 WiFi Sparc-core for instance. (How do they get WiFi and cloud based over the air updates into a product for 1/2 the cost of hard wired?)

If I step away from asking that POE be on the board and power it some other way - even perhaps using a POE-injector/splitter set of cables, are there any controllers that have training wheels on the Ethernet portion? Coding is not my strong suit, so I'd like to be able to see some results and make things happen at the other end of a CAT6 cable and have status updates via a web page without having to learn and program my own network stack.

Some Googling brings up the netduino family, which looks like it has a slightly better price point than Arduino Ethernet, and according to AdaFruits site: "The Netduino Plus 2 has Ethernet cooked in already! There is a full TCP/IP stack with examples ready to go, and a microSD card slot for storing files" While this looks attractive, it also looks like it is programmed in C# via Microsofts Visual C# Express, which means another learning curve - though this one may be more widely applicable, since C# and C++ and the "Arduino programming language" share so much.

Any thoughts?

Glen
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.triembed.org/pipermail/triembed_triembed.org/attachments/20140311/5f220683/attachment.htm>