Getting Started with the Porting Kit

So, you are now ready to take the plunge and start building the device you’ve always had in mind. Grab our Porting Kit for less than $600, a set of tools from ARM, Keil, or GCC and get cracking. Adding to a real-time OS is easy through Interop now included in V3.0 or you can design straight to the metal. And the new Solution Wizard helps utilize only the components you really need, keeping overall memory requirements to a minimum. Move beyond the hobbyist/experimenter category and show how superior UI, simple managed driver creation and easy Visual Studio application development can create a cool new connected device within months!

The .NET Micro Framework Porting Kit allows you to make adjustments to a publicly available board, build your own board or port on top of an existing Operating System (e.g. a real-time system like ThreadX). The Kit is very comprehensive, full of extensive details with lots of examples, including source code sample HALs for certain NXP, Atmel, Freescale, ADI and Nuvoton/Winbond processors among others. A new Solution Wizard allows you to be selective over just which components you need to utilize in your device, getting down as low as a 64K footprint for certain headless devices.

Please note that you will need some extra tools to make full use of the Kit. There are 3 options for ARM processors – ARM RVDS 3.1, Keil MDK, GCC 4.2.1. In general, our team has found that the ARM and Keil toolchains produce smaller code size. For Blackfin processors you’ll need ADI’s VisualDSP++ 5.0.

The other caveat is that you can’t really build a commercial device at this point because the Porting Kit provides tools to build time-bombed runtime images. You get 720 hours of runtime – basically 2 years at 1 hour per day or one month at 24 hours per day. However, if you need more time you can easily re-flash.

Warren Dent

Director of Business Development