FEZ Mini Question

I am very impressed by the FEZ boards.  I'll probably be getting the Mini+Robot Kit.  Looks awesome.  However...

Realistically speaking, what can you do with either Fez Mini or Domino?  I see that they are based on the USBIzi chipset, which has 96 KB of RAM.  Is that really enough to do anything useful really?  Won't the .NET framework be constantly garbage collecting due to memory pressure?   

I am not trying to flame, just trying to find out more before I commit to spending a ton of time with this puppy.  

Follow-up question.  I see that there are a lot of add-on modules.  Is it possible to increase the amount of available memory via the add-ons?

Good question! We have USBizi (the core of FEZ) used in commercial products so it is not only good for beginners, it can be used to make designs that you actually sell. RAM is small when compared to PCs but most of the things you need to run "on FEZ" will not require a lot of RAM. What do you want to make? MP3 player? GPS data logger? move the robot in a maze?....all this can be done easily with FEZ (USBizi). FEZ can do almost anything  PIC, AVR, STAMP, Arduino can...and if your project got bigger than you can upgrade to Embedded Master. 

About your comment on GC, you really want to try write your code in a way where it doesn't allocate/free object if not necessary. Our free ebook has a section that talks about "thinking small" that is especially there for those who come from the PC world and not used to use little RAM.

That sounds good.  

Follow-up question.  The flash memory is 0.5MB.  How much, specifically, is actually available to the application?  Is this 0.5MB - minute space taken up by the boot loaded and firmware?  Or is it truly 0.5MB?

The application gets about 100K and this is very much plenty. Remember, this is 100K of compiled code, not resources