.NET Micro Framework and the Fez Robot

Robot in Red

My robot arrived today. It is from TinyCLR, who are (I think) part of  GHI Electronics.  They have released a whole new set of boards based on Version 4.0 of the .NET Micro Framework. The boards are branded as FEZ (Short for "Freakin' Easy!") and there is even a picture of a Fez on the board itself. There are two FEZ boards, the FEZ Domino which is pin compatible with an Arduino and the FEZ Mini which is compatible with the Basic Stamp device.  Both of these new devices use a single chip implementation of the Micro Framework.

I’ve been saying for ages is that what we need is a set of boards and components that use the .NET Micro Framework, are sensibly priced and well supported. It seems that GHI agree, since that is what they have done. They’ve also produced a free book which you can download to find out how to use the framework. This is a nice introduction to the technology and to the Fez platform.  I’ve not had time to do much with the new hardware just yet. But I did manage to assemble the robot and make it try to jump off the desk. 

Robot in Blue

In the future I’m going to start putting some projects up on my Micro Framework pages as I play more with this lovely system.