.NET on a Microcontroller with Wilderness Labs Meadow IoT solution

oh I didn't see you there hi I'm Scott
and right he's talking to this
microphone cool how's it going friends
I'm here with with Adrian how are you
doing well thank you very much one of my
top 10 favorite Canadians and we brought
a bunch of things to show which I think
would be fun yeah and will you push the
buttons or do you push the what we want
to talk about is is dotnet specifically
for tiny devices right how tiny like I
have a Raspberry Pi but it runs an
entire operating system right so the
Raspberry Pi I'm a huge fan of it's
really it's a it's a tiny computer it's
a full micro processor processor yeah
works Iran dotnet on a micro controller
okay
microprocessor microcontroller it's
small but like processor controller
you know potato potato yeah so think
less power a lot less power so much more
people running out battery doesn't
require full operating systems we're not
gonna have this whole Windows
environment that we see on sale Windows
laptop or a Raspberry Pi okay so these
don't boot into full operating systems
that are multi-layered with kernels and
drivers and haut and user mode and a
show and write yes
so is it essentially these into being
when you write your app for a micro
controller you're in basically a single
purpose product you're going to run the
application and the only thing that
really beats definitely running and
executing is your application okay about
how like we know when you run something
in a container
you don't necessarily run like a full
Ubuntu and then you're ten yet you run
like Alpine or something with a tiny
surface area these little operating
systems are they call real-time
operating systems right there have a
very small surface area right yes they
do the minimum and so they needs a
minimum so your application gets the
most the resources oh and they're
constrained rich devices but well they
also end up being very very stable it's
really just running your application you
boot almost you booting into dotnet
effectively you're putting into a tiny
operating system which runs your one app
yes okay and this case mono as well can
we share the screen or do we do a
picture-in-picture
push this is all right cool so this i'm
not associated with this company i just
think it's really cool will
labs they have like we know and meadow
and what we're talking about here is
meadow so it's a platform that runs
dotnet standard 2.0 and dotnet standard
2.0 is really great because it means
that it's c-sharp code that you're
writing to a standard that you know I
could write a console app and it would
do stuff I could write a constant could
write that library and put it in the
cloud or I could take a library and
depending on how I wrote it if I wrote
it to a standard I could put it on this
tiny device absolutely so you can use
all the great c-sharp skills that you
develop building mobile applications
desktop applications cloud applications
and apply those skills to making IOT
application right right and one of the
things that's really interesting about
this idea of a microcontroller is that
as as Brian from wilderness labs likes
to say is it's going to become the
dominant form of computing like there's
more microcontrollers than there are
like people yeah absolutely we think
about this a lot in consumer world
things like like nest and you know home
automation but that's really a small
horse of that market I think truly it's
it's industry and automation where
there's huge numbers these devices
already deployed we see a really big
growth in that area so when you think
about Internet of Things these things
are not gonna sorry gonna boot into
Windows or Mac or boot into a boon to it
they're gonna put into a a tiny
real-time operating system yeah I think
the way I think about it is often you
don't need those full os's and there are
ok there are cases where you want that
and you're Nam you know like the guy
point-of-sale systems or they might have
a little more functionality but for a
lot of things running behind the scenes
for automation we want those things
super efficient super super stable
mm-hmm and and obviously very secure
exactly and who needs the headache of an
entire giant operating system when you
can go and do something like this now
let's think about specifications we know
when the Raspberry Pi spent $35 to micro
processor 35 bucks and it has no
gigahertz right milk quad processor
gigahertz 4 gigs
8 gigs of RAM look at this 16 Meg's of
RAM
200 megahertz but it's also got Wi-Fi
Bluetooth and it can go and do things
like jpeg acceleration but with these
small specs I can still run a dotnet
application absolutely so John and I
think about as being either interpreted
just-in-time compiled or ahead of time
compiled
we doing that so we are running the full
mono on this so it is Oh make sure it
must speak here but I believe we are it
should be je compiled and then well in
this case here we're gonna boot into
this little application with a a build
that we built locally and then we sent
across the wire onto this tiny device
let me actually do a little trick here
if you don't mind get frisked and I just
want to run my camera locally here so
this is my camera surprise it's gonna be
freaky hey friends Hey look at this
this is what the device looks like well
tiny that is like a stick of gum
hey smaller than the size of your finger
a little tiny thing very very light runs
battery life could be a measured in days
and weeks and not hours as it is
absolutely if I okay so check this out
look at this friends like we did for you
know if this will actually work because
of mirrored images let's do this will
change and you talk about the sides here
and keep in mind this actually is a
prototyping board this is adult men
board and so this will be an open source
open hardware project so you can of
course make this into your own hardware
projects and make this even smaller and
that fun so this is the development
board and user to your point it could be
smaller you could build this into
anything yes and what's fun about this
is that you can go and use whatever
makes you happy for example we've got in
my little kit here all kinds of stuff we
could potentially play with I've got a
soil moisture sensor I've got LCD screen
and a segmented display I've got a ink
you can see here we wrote on e you could
potentially do a tricolor ink here that
we got from Adafruit there's potential
there lots of different things that we
could do but when I'm writing this code
well let's see what it looks like is
that cool yes absolutely
alright so this is a part that I'm so
excited about so I'm just gonna go into
visual studio here and let's do this
I've got two things to show you first
let's open up visual studio again and
I'm going to go into my github and let's
look at this e ink display
okay yes absolutely you know a paper I
think we call that and I point here that
we're of course you're opening up Visual
Studio 2019 yeah that's a good point I
could open up visual studio code and
edit it as a text file did you just see
sharp but let's look at this this is
actually a Visual Studio 2019 and I just
added a physics you know I added an
extension to it to make this work with
with meadow but let's take a look at for
example this ePaper I'm just gonna right
click on this and I'm going to say edit
project file okay and look at that see s
proj here okay we're targeting look the
meadow SDK in this sense now in this
here it's pretending to be net 472 which
is what mono supports but if we go and
look at one of these displays go look at
these so we've got these different
libraries that use the meadow foundation
and then let's go and look at the
program itself check this up I'll go
ahead and make that bigger here just
make an instance of our new app and then
basically chill out so we look inside
this I love this it's an app of type f7
micro which is that chip that we're
using here on this particular device
right yeah exactly so this will match
the the hardware the form factor so in
the future other board will come out and
you can swap in make sense because the
meadow platform could work on other
things and you'd have an app of that
type as well which is really really cool
if we go in here and we say like
initialize hardware I understand that
with microcontrollers there's different
buses there's different ways to talk to
things what is an SPI bus so that's the
serial peripheral interface that's a
fairly well-known it's a standard
communication protocol
generally it's good for high speed
devices and you'll see it's used in a
lot of these types of displays for
example because that's good for pushing
a lot of data and this is interesting
because you see right here there's this
this right this ribbon almost river
effectively made our own ribbon cable
here yes yeah exactly right and it looks
like we've got eight bits going across
that into a number of things you've got
your ground your power and then a little
bus here how BIG's the bus for these or
three or six of these so the bus itself
was actually two wires but there's
there's a few extra things for various
bits control so there's um get your
power and your ground over here pairing
the ground
and you've got do through do three and
then you've got scx and then mosey yeah
so there's there's a clock signal for
SPI which is just to make sure that the
two devices are talking at the same time
and then mosey is master out slaving
which is sort of old school technology
we don't use it it's a master slave
anymore but that's the standard for SPI
the meadow in this case is the master
and this screen is the it would be the
slaves I see there yeah and you see the
Mesa which would be if you had devices
that were sensors or reading data in
from the world I had to push that data
back to the metal board and then there's
a reset painted a to command pan they're
just some extra pins generally use an
SPI I'm good until details right now but
they're so common to wire up and we use
those when the GPIO pins on meadow and
what I'm finding really great about this
platform I'm on Windows and you're on a
Mac I'm gonna go out here because
there's a tool that I'm gonna be using
to just plug this in I wrote a blog post
about this so you can just flash this on
Windows was really easy with this thing
called dfu I did this one time just to
install the operating system and I
haven't thought about this since this is
not it used to be hard to do this kind
of work and you'd go and install generic
USB drivers and all this kind of stuff
but all I had to do is just plug the
meadow in with USB
showed up as a serial port yes yeah that
seems to be the nice clean generic way
to do things it showed up as a serial
port and I said oh it's on comm port 3
yes exactly and then from within my
application here in Visual Studio look I
can go and say right-click deploy and I
got a nice clean experience yes and you
do have this one visual to you on the
Mac as well absolutely on the Mac and
and you mentioned the comm port one
thing that's really nice about that of
course is Windows Mac OS supports
multiple courts which can allow us to
have multiple devices plugged in
simultaneously and select which ones to
deploy in the future yeah and then the
we have this concept of a driver and
this isn't like a driver like a dot sis
file or something on I've got a question
well you can feel free to just throw
questions in it's open question your
script 23 is is the board powered only
by the USB port a great question is a
great question so depends on if you're
developing or not yeah yeah exactly so
when we're developing we'll just plug in
the micro USB cable and that will power
the board now of course
if you are using peripherals that
require more power you know our displays
are probably you'll see one is backlit
and that's put to limit to how much
power we wouldn't pull through the
meadow so you might want to have
external power and then once you've got
you know a hardened solution you want
deploy in the field meadow can be
powered up battery as well and there's
actually a battery port right on the air
and they reminder again there this is in
fact a and I'll go ahead and bring the
camera up again this is a development
board but when we switch back over to
here you can see come something
interesting you can see your micro USB
here and then I can power that off a
lipo yes yes I've done that or have a
little bit the Impala battery and that
works really great as well and those can
last for a very long time and again this
is the development for the other one
will be a different size and to this
point actually let's try something a
little more sophisticated than eating
because the e-ink is effectively hello
world yeah I wanted to challenge us to
do something more interesting perfect
let's do that I'm gonna go back over
here and I'm gonna say recent projects
and I want to go back over into my FM
radio basically check that this here
this was a challenging we've been
working on this this afternoon and and
by we I mean you and I was also there
but I get to what to take lots of credit
for it and I thought this was super fun
because what Adrienne Witten did here is
he made an FM radio yes
and I wanted to explain this concept to
folks that understand dotnet because I
thought it would be a fun way to do it
here so what we've got I'll go ahead and
put my camera back on here we're gonna
do this check this out okay friends so
we've got a radio there we go thank you
sir you've got a radio here we've got
the meadow board here we've got some
buttons over here there's the meadow we
happen to be powering it over USB but
doesn't have to be that way but I want
to be able to debug it and you know come
to this if I want to and here you go
looking actually it's oh it's upside
down
well not it's I've got it upside down
here what I want to flip around the
others
it's okay like this there we go alright
so what we're doing here is we're
listening to the local public radio
station here and Seattle or in Redmond
where we happen to be okay so what I'm
gonna do friends is why don't you give
me a favor Jeff which I want you to hold
this and I'm gonna hold that there and
what we've got is our speakers now we're
getting the Sun I think we're in a
building here so yeah that cool so what
we've done here I'll go ahead and unplug
the speakers cuz this that's fun oops so
how would we do a radio right how do we
do a radio friends let's look at this
it's it's fun because I like it cuz its
model-view-controller okay think about
this gold ass is requesting radio
stations I guess so
no now there's a question RadioShack
come on we're not taking requests here
people what's wrong with you
when I say model-view-controller this is
my construction not a meadow thing but I
thought about this and it's like well
there's the view right absolutely
here's them here's the model here's the
database to thing the webservice the
object the the model the physical model
and then in this context the dotnet code
is the controller yeah I love this in
that great and then you've got your
buttons there that will set it to mute
or to scan forward to the next FM radio
station which is really really cool this
is the kind of cool stuff now again this
is a prototype that we've made if we're
gonna go and sell our radio now we need
to put an enclosure in a box yeah
exactly quartz you get one with it it's
a great app you sir you know 3d printing
to get your first first engineering
sample going mm-hmm
and then yeah I don't quote me on all
the parts but Moses are standard
off-the-shelf so you should be no
problem to you know big a custom board
and okay so could this run dotnet core
three right so right now it's using mono
but in some theoretical future as dotnet
core
mono merge that I should have share that
code yeah so um maybe in the dawn at
5:00 timeframe yes I think you do Baron
I whip I I believe there's some some
there's something so the intent the
intent is to reconcile the dot Nets into
a single dot net and mono right now is
really let's talk about that for a
second mono makes sense for something
like this because it's clean portable C
code it's got a great easy to build code
environment yes mono is portable mono
can run on a Nintendo switch or a we
write because it's so portable so the
ability to be able to go and take mono
and then take some of the ahead of time
compilation things and modify it in such
a way that it works it's a small device
is important but in the future we're
gonna take down at core framework and
mono and merge them into some kind of
unified thing now those plans or years
out two years out but certainly I don't
see any reason why they couldn't but I
don't know if I can speak for folks at
the news life yeah and I'm overstating
the goal is to make sure the sillies if
the want is for it to be a modern
development experience yeah so I think
as dotnet evolves you'll see the meadow
platform evolve and you know he's me
mention the start you know supporting
dotnet standard yeah and that's really
nice way to share your Cove between
dotnet Accord on that framework well and
let's talk about that for a second
because if we look at the code here
let's remind ourselves so the individual
said could it run down at core three and
the question is does it matter because
in this case if it is running to a
standard if you have the functions that
you're used to having then it doesn't
matter your code is reusable exactly
yeah but in the context of these kind of
single tasked applications let's call
this a single tasked radio application
as soon as I do something that's
specific to a piece of hardware if I'm
on Windows and I decide to go and do
talk to the registry right I'm using
done at core three but now talking to
the registry race now you've got a
desktop cific application sir I just
became Windows specific I can't do the
registry on a boon to if I am doing a
Raspberry Pi application and I talked to
a GPIO pin let's say that I hard-coded
two GPIO seven now it's not only
Raspberry Pi specific but it's specific
to a wiring diagram the way I made it
then again with no matter what dotnet
it's been written and it's now married
to the the system so if we go back over
here I like the way you did this you've
got your digital output for your led
your input for your mute button let's
look at initialize hardware what's great
about this is that c-sharp do we know
how to read it and you go and you say
hey this pin is for output and this pin
number 12 which we've looking at our
thing here yes we in that for 12 and
then you go and get the bus ready and
then you let us know
0 1 2 those are the pins that that
device for the display is sitting on set
the contrast then we have an i2c bus
another kind of bus and the bus exactly
that's the one to be FM tuner is using
mm-hmm and then we've got this te a 57
67 you can go in Google for that with
Bing and learn about that particular FM
radio which sits on that bus you see how
you're chaining those together and then
here we're just hard coding it in the to
start out with the local radio station
and then we've got a search button the
button is then hooked up and you'll see
that there's a nice event there to go
and say button chain so it's very
familiar experience yeah and one thing I
love to call out here is typically for
these kind of applications you're able
to do all the hardware have the you know
the also with the software wiring but
the hardware plumbing in a single method
with an initialize method yeah and
that's really the only place you need to
do that any hardware interaction
otherwise it's just C sharp and dotnet
so it's all just familiar coding in a
familiar environment and look how easy
it is so after you have initialized
Hardware then we just have an update
display and then update display gets
updated yes as soon as anything changes
in this case and we're going to say draw
text at zero zero I mean like I don't
know IOT but I know this that's what
makes me happy look the ternary operator
in c-sharp like this is C sharp that you
already know which is super fun yeah and
I think that's what's really means about
mono when it's running all these devices
that yeah our skills are transplantable
absolutely look it sounds like some of
our friends in the chat room are little
inspired and they want to know well the
source code be sure I don't see why not
actually we've got this source code
right now over here I think it's hidden
but there's
no reason we couldn't make this thing
that we were messing around with oh yeah
absolutely
now it's early days but you can see
right now this is a an hour ago when we
got all this stuff working you can see
the FM radio code we were working on
that as much as recently as an hour ago
and then the ePaper display I want to do
point out to be clear that this is a
beta we're on beta theory yeah of meadow
I think it's like what made us be a
meadow beta 3 bi 3.1 I believe 3.1 beta
3 and it's so it's very early here who
knows what will be done things will
change your mileage may vary yes but go
and explore our friends at wilderness
labs in their website and talk to them
this was actually a successful
Kickstarter and they're kicking out
these now you can go and watch a video
about how this this project works and
how it is gonna hopefully move forward
and do a lot of really cool stuff yeah
absolutely lots still coming so if we
sell let me add Wi-Fi support for some
Bluetooth there's some performance
improvements coming plus a lot more
driver surface yeah yeah if I go and
look at my device manager right now and
I can see right here I can see ports and
there's sure them I know this is
actually kind of a fun thing or fun hack
that folks do if you have a circuit
python device from Adafruit you plug it
in it looks like a disk drive in this
case it looks like a comport because
it's kind of a universal bus like it's
talking to these things really really
easily and in fact if I remember
correctly there's also a I mean I'm on
my desktop here let's go to desktop
meadow there is a actually a CLI as well
a command line interface maybe we can do
a little something with that yeah
absolutely so the CLI is really it's the
the proof of concept all the
communication to meadow this is what's
actually powering the visual to you
attention mm-hmm so if I go and say can
I see like file system lists look like -
- list files yes
definitely see if that works there you
go so I just said list file said port
com3
opened hitting a list of file types you
can see there that it says mono is
currently enabled so it's turned on
right here if it was disabled we might
be formatting the file system or -
flashing a new firmware on top of it
well so actually so interesting for the
command line well double mono off and on
so we can work with the device without
not the executing application so we
mentioned it right now you plug it in
runs just runs right that idea that the
single purpose so it automatically runs
the it looks for actually a BAC mono
fires up so you can disable mono allow
you to you drop the file system without
the app running hmm and then these are
just the deals
yes exact right in the mono right so
let's think about the layers here right
you get like sister not object the
meadow foundation you can see the
drivers for your your FM radio on your
screen right the meadow stuff that's
underneath meadow that foundation and
then the graphics library to output to
the screen draw the text ya decode get
maps whatever needs to go and not
actually that's a good call Oh in that's
just code to me play data in memories
just buffering which is a really great
point actually if we go back over to
that and take a look at the graphics
library what's fun about these things is
you can find out about the underneath
like there's nothing hidden here you're
not hiding anything from us you're like
look that's a real font what's in there
it's the width of a height in 8x8 right
this is actually we build little tools
actually had it was a lwith application
you design the fonts my hands you just
went and draw it and it's saved into a
complete the bytearray fire exactly and
when you go and you do these things it's
like okay you know pull it out of the
font table yeah this is it when there's
nothing else hiding from you there look
there's all your fonts yeah
and that's very common in this kind of a
tiny environment right yeah cuz of
course they're they're super small super
efficient right so we go back to our
camera here take a look at what this
font looks like I'm just gonna bring it
around to the other side of the camera
here well the cameras coming out is this
were coated to a particular version of
mono where can he be updated so I will
actually show you in just a moment here
seaton there you go so there's the font
that we're drawing on the screen right
there and that's the 8 by 12 the 8 by
1200 exactly so
about the versions and the how these
things work for example I received my
board when I got mine for my Kickstarter
on version 3.0 of this operating system
so I plugged it in and you have to think
about the layers right and correct me if
I'm wrong here but it by default it
boots up in the mano with mano enable
that looks for a PXE and it run so you
turn it on and it runs but if I hit
reset while it's plugged in it's gonna
go into this device firmware updating
mode and then I could go and run DFU
util lash the operating system on top of
it yeah all that's bundle and included
with that so when I downloaded it this
is mono here yes exactly and the stuff
in it and that comes with with the
meadow so we are kind of dependent upon
the folks that are working on this with
their version of mono to make this work
yes and so yeah I mean there are as
there there are some parts of other
deployed with the deployment the OS you
sell itself and actually that MS core
live what we deploy as NuGet package
yeah a separate pulldown in terms of
being up to date last version mono
without miss I don't want to overstate
my understanding his intentions to keep
it up to date yep and so when changes
are made to mono does we pulled into the
verse of model gets deployed on meadow
so pretty amazing stuff I just wanted to
share it with you all I thought it was
so cool again I'm not affiliated with
this company but they seemed really cool
wilderness labs dot Co they had a
Kickstarter I'm a supporter I think it's
great you can see I've got my kit that I
got from them as well as the the
wilderness labs piece of wood on which
the breadboard is mounted so this is
just an example of kind of the great
stuff that happens with open source and
dotnet and thank you for for hanging out
with me thank you so much for inviting
me in so yeah absolutely
cool now what Jeff rinsed now we're
gonna bring in our other host and we're
gonna set up for our next yes
deuces this is how later all right