Any good Internet of Things (IoT) platform requires good WIFI support.Anyone looking for WIFI support in WEC, especially under ARM, knows how frustrating this can be. Sure there were a few token legacy drivers out of the box but these, for the most part, were already out of production. Under WEC2013 it gets even tougher as WEC2013 broke binary compatibility with previous versions of the OS. As many previous OS WIFI drivers were only supplied in binary form, this meant drivers written for CE 6 or WEC7 and supplied in binary form will not work under WEC2013. If you were fortunate enough to have the source you could just recompile it and chances are it may work in WEC2013. We in the MVP community voiced strong feedback to Microsoft and the WEC development team expressing the need for more and better WIFI support. I guess someone was listing as they threw us a bone. We were told the WL127X WIFI drivers from TI were going to be supplied, in source form on several occasions. Unfortunately they backed peddled and o ...

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Remote Display Application is a Windows Embedded CE application that allows you to remotely access  to a target device using your development workstation, similar to Remote Desktop Connection for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. Remote Display Application is only available up to Windows Embedded Compact 7 and Windows Embedded Compact 2013 is no longer featured. The Remote Display Application tools comes in two parts, a server and a client. The ServerThe CERHOST is an application specifically for a Windows Embedded CE development workstation and it must be launched before the client. The Remote Display Application (CERHOST) can be found in the following folder. C:\WINCE600\PUBLIC\COMMON\OAK\BIN\I386The ClientThe CERDisp is the Windows Embedded CE client  and must be included in the OS Runtime Image by selecting Remote Display Application component  to your OS Design Project. It is not necessary to launch the Remote Display Application automatically but is a good practice to learn so tha ...

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In the Internet of Things world and especially when we are going to protect the data transmitted by an embedded system from prying eyes through encryption algorithms (AES, DES, 3DES, RSA, ...) and with related network protocols (SSL, TLS , DTLS, ...), correct date/time on our board plays a fundamental role.

In fact, the encryption algorithms are strongly based on Pseudor-Random Number Generators (PRNG), which often needs to use the current date/time as a "seed" of the generation. Being pseudo-random generators and not real generators, it is important that for each system boot the "seed" is different otherwise the generated sequence is the same as the earlier boot and therefore predictable.

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One of the biggest initiatives of 2014 was definitely the birth of DotNetPodcast, podcast completely in Italian and dedicated to Microsoft technologies. Guests are always of the highest level and earlier this year, I had the honor of being able to record an episode, completely dedicated to the Internet of Things and the development of IoT solutions using the .Net Micro Framework.

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One of the essential hardware interfaces needed for any good IoT platform is an analog input. Many sensors output a low level voltage proportional to the measured signal. For example, a temperature sensor may output a voltage of 0 to 3 volts for temperature values from 0 to 80 degrees Celsius. A nice feature of the AM335x processor used on the BeagleBone is that it already incorporates an 8 channel 12bit Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) on chip. The ADC is mainly used for the touch screen interface for LCD displays but the extra channels can also be used as general purpose analog inputs. The open source Windows Embedded Compact BSP is available on Codeplex at Beaglebone BSP. The standard driver used the ADC exclusively for touch screen so I had to make several modifications to allow for general purpose use. This involved pulling out all the ADC setup and scanning to a dedicated ADC driver. The touch samples were then shared with the touch driver, which runs on a different thread, through a message queue. T ...

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This is the first article, in Italian, focused on write and registry filters in Windows Embedded Standard environment.

Questo è l’articolo introduttivo di una serie di articoli focalizzati sui filtri sui dischi e sul registro in ambiente Windows Embedded Standard.

L’esigenza di mettere dei filtri sui dischi, soprattutto su quello di sistema, è stata una delle prime scaturite dall’idea di sviluppare un dispositivo embedded. L’obiettivo iniziale era quello di poter avere una “applicazione” dedicata ad uno scopo preciso e che quindi ogni volta che ripartiva aveva le stesse configurazioni senza sapere cosa era successo nel suo periodo di lavoro precedente.

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It is a great pleasure for me to start contributing to Embedded101 community. I have recently decided to resume the chapters of the book I was writing on "Windows Embedded Standard," in Italian, and to publish them as a post on the sites where they can be useful.

Soon I will publish four articles focusing on the topic of “Write and Registry Filters in Windows Embedded Standard”.

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A new use case for M2Mqtt library !! The case studies section of the official web site has a new great example usage !

Jon Gallant from Microsoft (IoT maker team) wrote an interesting article about his “maker experience” with a demo on using MQTT on a Raspberry Pi. In this scenario, he doesn’t use native C/C++ library available for MQTT but he made the great choice to use C# language and M2Mqtt library on Mono project !

The article describers all the steps to setup the entire demo from hardware to Mono installation on the Raspberry Pi and example code execution.

Great to see another M2Mqtt use case but this time on a Linux environment !

After about a month of work during my free time, it's finally time to release the new version of the M2Mqtt library (4.0.0.0) and the related GnatMQ broker (0.9.3.0 Beta) with the MQTT OASIS 3.1.1specification support (in addition to some bug fixes).

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The latest release of the open source BSP for the BeagleBone has several improvements and bug fixes.

A new PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) component was added to allow up to six different independent PWM channels, all available on the standard expansion connectors. I wrote a managed (C#) test program you can use to vary the frequency and duty cycle of each channel.

Other improvements include the ability to add a custom boot splash screen that is displayed when first powered on and a progress bar that shows the load progress.

The prebuilt demo image was also refreshed to incorporate all the latest improvements and bug fixes.