Meadow Kickstarter

Our friends at Wilderness Labs have just launched their Kickstarter for their new Meadow board. This was really exciting when we first heard about it a few weeks ago and we’re even more excited now that it’s on Kickstarter. It’s clear that there is a huge value proposition for .NET and Visual Studio on embedded devices!

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fully agree. board is plan to arrive in February. really curious to check

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Thanks for your support, folks!!

hang on, runs .NET Standard 2.0?!? :heart_eyes:

EDIT: I’ll take it!

sure does. :slight_smile:

via Mono. It’s awesome.

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Do you think you could do the same thing but for the Beagle Bone Black? :heart_eyes:

EDIT: Congrats on getting funded, in less than a day!

This looks so good and I decided to not do any more Kickstarters but I caved in on this one :slight_smile:

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I thought about it, but Im broke again now. (And I just bought a Feather M4 Express and some featherwings from adafruit, only to discover that they are really geared towards python, and using real compilers on them isnt so easy) ::frowning:

Anyone planning to port tiny CLR to the Feather (Cortex) M4 Express?
SAMD51J19
120MHz Cortex M4 with FPU, 512KB Flash and 192KB RAM

so, it’s not micro framework? It’s full framework running under mono?

Python seems to be popular but there is no debugging as far as I can see. Can’t be bothered going backwards after years of using in circuit debugging tools. :slight_smile:

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I definitely like what I see in this board. Even if it’s still an interpreted IL machine, it brings the full .Net Standard 2.0 stack (plus MCU goodies) to the party which is a big step forward.

I’ve always viewed netmf, tinyclr, and now Meadow primarily as development accelerants and gateway tech, where you trade some amount of performance, or some amount of cash for more expensive hardware, in exchange for a shortened and simplified dev cycle. That fills an important niche for small run quantities, hobbyists, uncontested markets, etc. For large run quantities, where BOM cost is a bigger factor and dev cost is better amortized, native code still rules the day. This all becomes much more exciting when we get to .Net AOT compiled native code system because then you get the best of both worlds. That was the unrealized potential of llilum and I hope AOT-compiled Mono is somewhere on the Meadow roadmap.

Random musings aside, the tech here is definitely interesting and by my very rough estimates, the apparent price/performance at the kickstarter price looks great.

I was going to take a pass on this one, but I’m going to set my misgivings aside and ante up for one.

EDIT: Pledged

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Correct, full .NET via Mono. No MicroFramework anywhere in sight on this board. :slight_smile:

We funded in 4.5 hours, and hit 200% funding in two days! Thanks, folks!

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JIT compilation? PLEASE!

Long-term, it’ll likely be a combination of AOT, JIT, and Interpreted. Some things are great AOT, generics are better JIT’d (they balloon executable size when AOT’ing), but also, the interpreter is incredibly fast for a lot of things these days.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s faster than the netmf interpreter just because of the number of platform developer eyeballs that were on Mono and Xamarin compared to netmf, but are there any concrete benchmarks for a head-to-head comparison or other objective basis for “incredibly fast”?

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Nothing to put out yet, but we will publish benchmarking tests and such at some point.

As you mentioned; the NetMF interpreter is like 15 years old, and never saw any real optimization. The Mono interp engine is hott.

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Well done on the Kickstarter Meadow. 500% funding!

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Well finally shipping; just under a year later. I’m told that it’s normal for a project on Kickstarter to take this long. I hope that the ESP32 chip that’s on there can be flashed with nanoFramework. That would be so cool. :star_struck:

(sorry to slightly deviate here - but I’m still waiting for my Agent (netmf) Smart Watch. )