Simon Taylor - Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer : Electronics Projects for Hobbyists and Inventors: Electronics Projects for Hobbyists and Inventors

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To my wife, Tsvetana, whose support and
encouragement keeps me going.

Simon Taylor (Southampton, United Kingdom) has been working with embedded device hardware and software for more than 30 years. In 1994 he created the design consultancy Sytech Designs Ltd., which he still runs today. His career started as an Electronics engineer with the Royal Air Force, specializing in air radio and navigation. After leaving the Air Force, he started working in the newly emerging embedded computer world, initially working on ground-breaking digital video framestores and special effects units, leading to his being head-hunted by a Silicon Valley video technology company and relocating to sunny California.

This was followed by a move to the space town, Huntsville, Alabama, where he worked for a theatrical lighting manufacturer. In addition to lighting and laser controllers, he designed several serial control protocols and a system of recording lighting control signals on VHS video tape alongside the stereo audio. Following his return to the United Kingdom, he started Sytech Designs. Sytech Designs specializes in embedded designs, machine-to-machine communications, and transport systems. In his role at Sytech Designs, he has led design projects involving communications, GPS, GSM, and card payment systems. He has been involved with Micro Framework since the early days and is a member of the Micro Framework Core Team and is a Micro Framework partner. Sytech Designs is one of the first manufacturers designing and manufacturing Gadgeteer mainboards and modules.

Frederick Brooks, the author of the seminal book The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (Addison-Wesley Professional), described the delights of programming as including the sheer joy of making things and the delight of working in such a tactile medium where it prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, and moves arms. Almost every programmer I speak with remembers their early experiments with LEDs and servos, even if they have been away from building devices for some time.

I have had the opportunity to teach programming at several levels, and I have seen that creating things that interact with you, with other objects, and with the environment around them can be very engaging. There is also the opportunity for experimenting in the explosion of connected devices that will instrument our world in the next generation. That is what .NET Gadgeteer is all about.

The challenge in approaching these kinds of projects has always been the steep initial learning curve. In the past, to complete an electronics project even as simple as turning on an LED, you needed to know where to get and how to select compatible electronic components, load compatible development tools, learn a new language or a new dialect of a desktop language, pick up some fabrication skills such as breadboarding or soldering, learn embedded interfaces at least to the level of GPIO, find out how to deploy your code to the device, and then heaven help you if it didnt do what you wanted because you had to figure out how to debug what you put together (wiring, logic, and all).

.NET Gadgeteer reverses this equation so that you dont have to learn a lot before you can create something simplenow you can create something compelling very quickly, and you can drill into the details as you need and want to. The impact of this is evident. Nearly every day, new blog entries are written by someone who has taken Gadgeteer off the shelf (so to speak) and created something cool very quickly. For example, the standard first demo that we do on the NETMF/Gadgeteer team is to write a functional camera in about four lines of code with components that just plug together. This simplicity is important, because it means that the reinforcement of building cool stuff starts immediately.