Paul Ferrill

Microsoft teamed up with MXChip to build a brand new IoT development board with a ton of features. This tiny device comes with WiFi, a 128X64 OLED display, an on-board microphone plus infrared, and pressure, motion, humidity, and temperature sensors. This little board even includes a magnetometer and gyroscope for sensing orientation. All you add […]

If you want to learn about the Internet of Things (IoT), you’ll want to get to know Arduino. The platform has been around for over ten years and has produced a wide range of basic boards and add-on devices. One key to Arduino’s popularity has been the continued use of a standard arrangement of input/output […]

Microsoft made the Raspberry Pi one of the initial targets for their IoT version of Windows 10 primarily due to the huge numbers of devices sold. The Raspberry Pi 3 adds WiFi and Bluetooth on the board to bring even more functionality to the platform. You will need to download the Windows 10 Insider Preview […]

In the first three parts of this series, we laid the foundation for a project that connects the Raspberry Pi 2 with some kind of external hardware. For this demo, we’re going to build a working stoplight using red, yellow, and green LEDs. We’ll be using Python to create a timed operation that cycles through […]

The Raspberry Pi 2 has a number of input and output channels, or general purpose I/O (GPIO) ports, available for programmatic control. Python has been one of the more popular languages on the Raspberry Pi since its introduction and remains so with the Pi 2. A quick web search for Raspberry Pi Python will return […]

One of the great uses for the Raspberry Pi has always been as a learning tool. The Raspberry Pi 2 continues this tradition and makes a great platform to learn how to program. Python has been one of the most popular programming languages for the Raspberry Pi, with a huge amount of content available on […]

The recently released Raspberry Pi 2 brings a new level of computing power to the hobbyist maker at the same low price point of $35 for the original Pi. The latest version delivers a 900MHz quad-core ARM CPU and 1 GB of memory while maintaining full compatibility with the original Pi. It also boasts expanded […]

In this video, you’ll see just how easy it is to get started developing for the Netduino Plus 2 using Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition. This video assumes you already have (the free) Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition installed on a machine with a physical USB connection, which you’ll need to download the code for […]

When you think about the tiny Arduino family of homebrew devices, you typically don’t think of Intel. Most versions of the Arduino are powered by some type of ARM device. Even though the Netduino will run the .NET Micro Framework, it’s still based on the STMicro Cortex M3 ARM chip. The Intel Galileo is based […]

Building electronics projects with the Aurdino family of hobbyist boards typically means writing software for a Linux platform. The Netduino changed that with the incorporation of the .NET Micro Framework in the base design. The Netduino Plus 2 is based on a 168 MHz STMicro 32-bit microcontroller and supports the standard header pins to allow […]