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
No comments:
Post a Comment