The Mountaineer Group
Mountaineer Release 4.2 QFE2
Mountaineer boards are shipped with NETMF 4.2 QFE1 preinstalled.
NETMF 4.2 QFE2 offers major enhancements, in particular the use of WinUSB, which is built into Windows Vista or newer. This allows to do away with board- and NETMF-specific USB drivers, which have not always been robust. WinUSB is a user mode USB driver, which means that errors cannot crash the entire operating system. No more "Blue Screens of Death".
A new feature of QFE2 is the analog output API that was contributed by Oberon microsystems, a member of the Mountaineer Group.
This page describes how you can update your system to QFE2 and provides the necessary files.
Warning: At this time, the Gadgeteer libraries have not yet been tested with QFE2. So you should only move to QFE2 if you work directly with the "plain vanilla" NETMF APIs, and do not use the Gadgeteer APIs. Thus Gadgeteer is not supported at the moment (support is planned for NETMF 4.3).
Warning: WinUSB only comes preinstalled with Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8. On the older Windows XP, it can be installed, but this is not trivial, has not been tested and is not supported.
Warning: WinUSB may not work with some virtual machines, thus QFE2 is not supported for development and deployment from virtual machines.
To install NETMF QFE2, please follow the steps given in the following PDF document:
The firmware and driver files for the two board types, as mentioned in the PDF document above, can be downloaded from here:
The above archives have been updated with new versions on 17 July 2014.
You can find the NETMF source code of the Mountaineer firmware on our Codeplex site.
If you are working with plain vanilla NETMF and Mountaineer boards, you need the Mountaineer.Netmf.Hardware project in order to use board-specific features:
