Mountaineer Release 4.3.1 (Beta 3)

Release 4.3.1 (also known as 4.3 QFE1).

Supported

Gadgeteer Core 2.43.900.

Supported

Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop (free), or one of the Pro / Premium / Ultimate editions.

VS 2012 can coexist with installations of older Visual Studio versions on the same PC. You can also develop for older versions of NETMF within VS2012.

Supported

STM32F407, 168 MHz, 192 KB RAM, 1 MB Flash.

For Mountaineer Prime projects: many other STM32 microcontrollers can be supported.

STM32F4 only has hardware (FPU) for single-precision values (type float), not for double-precision values (type double).

Original open source contribution by Oberon microsystems, Inc.

The Mountaineer USB Mainboard provides two independent USB Device ports. One can be used for debugging and deployment, the other for the application.

For Mountaineer Prime projects: USB mass storage profile for one connected device supported. Requires hardware with USB Host capabilites, e.g. a Mountaineer USB Mainboard. No 4 GB limit.

Hardware available only on Mountaineer Ethernet Mainboard.

Fast Ethernet driver implementation (interrupt-driven with DMA).

lwIP stack.

lwIP stack.

lwIP stack.

lwIP stack.

Maximum number of open sockets (i.e., simultaneous connections): 5

For Mountaineer Prime projects: This limit may be increased, depending on the hardware being used.

Hardware available only on Mountaineer Ethernet Mainboard. Must be explicitly enabled, see here.

See here for more information.

Class RandomNumberGenerator in namespace System.Security.Cryptography, in DLL System.Security.Cryptography.Netmf.

See here for more information.

For Mountaineer Prime projects: The hardware watchdog detects if the language runtime is stuck for some reason. Default timeout is one minute, can be increased to two minutes.

Limited support

(new)

A simple driver is provided in the Mountaineer SDK and described here. Add a reference to the Mountaineer assembly, and then use the FlashDriver class in namespace Mountaineer.Netmf.Flash.

For Mountaineer Prime projects: fast (4 bit bus) implementation. Requires hardware with an SD Card holder, e.g. the industrial M4-MCU board. No 4 GB limit.

For Mountaineer Prime projects: onboard flash file systems, SD Card file systems, and memory stick file systems support more than the typical 4 GB volume limit of NETMF.

For the standard firmware, see also the community-contributed Tiny File System of Taylorza and its driver by LouisCpro as an alternative.

Support for firmware updates in the field. See here for more information.

OpenSSL is about an order of magnitude too large for the STM32 on-chip memories.

Technology preview 

(new)

Experimental support for Daniel Bernstein's NaCl library of cryptographic primitives. See here for more details.

For Mountaineer Prime projects: highly optimized implementation of exactly the same API, at about half the footprint and up to two orders of magnitude higher speed.

Prime only

For Mountaineer Prime projects: library for accessing the unique 96-bit ID of STM32 microcontrollers, and the creation and storage of public/private key pairs.

Limited support

(new)

Bitmap data type and graphics operations are now supported in principle. However, there is no standard way in NETMF for efficiently copying a bitmap to a display. Thus displays are currently not supported.

Mountaineer mainboards have no T sockets.

Never required in customer projects yet.

Never required in customer projects yet.

No support in standard NETMF.

Mechanism is hardly usable in practice (nondeterministic commit times to Flash - you never know when your data is safely stored). Moreover, the STM32F4 Flash block structure would waste far too much of the on-chip Flash for EWR.

Never required in customer projects yet. Our focus is typically on more light-weight REST-based services instead.

Never required in customer projects yet.

Even the latest GCC version for Cortex-M still produces massively slower and larger code than the tools that we use (ARM MDK-Cortex-M 5.0).

Somestimes it can take up to a minute for an SD Card read or write operation to complete.

This may be a bug in the NETMF file system's Flush() method (https://netmf.codeplex.com/workitem/2149).

Workaround:   new Microsoft.SPOT.IO.VolumeInfo("\\SD").FlushAll();

Analog output has wrong value.

This is a bug in the Gadgeteer Core

(https://gadgeteer.codeplex.com/workitem/1666)

Plain vanilla NETMF code is not affected.

Fixed in Beta 2 (new Gadgeteer Core)

NetworkUp event does not fire if board starts up with cable attached (https://gadgeteer.codeplex.com/workitem/1752).

Fixed in Beta 2.

Sometimes lwIP produces an assertion ("tcp_pcb_purge: listen pcb does not have accepts pending" failed).

Workaround: none needed (ignore output).

Program can be slower without attached debugger (https://netmf.codeplex.com/workitem/2179).

Workaround: don't use Debug.Print().

No response is received from a Gadgeteer.Networking.WebServer instance.

This is a bug in the Gadgeteer Core

(https://gadgeteer.codeplex.com/workitem/1861)

Plain vanilla NETMF code is not affected.

Workaround: see the above Codeplex issue.

7) 10 Mbps does not work

Network stack does not work with 10 Mbps switches.

Fixed in Beta 2.

8) UDP broadcasts

UDP broadcasts cause exceptions.

Fixed in Beta 2.

9) Hangup after deployment

After deployment, a soft reboot happens, which sometimes hangs up the board.

Fixed in Beta 2.

When an USB stick is plugged in to the USB host connector, deployment does not work.

Fixed in Beta 2, only relevant for Mountaineer Prime Firmware.

12) Parity issue

Using odd/even parity for serial ports does not work.

Workaround: add 1 to bit number.

Fixed in Beta 2.

13) NotSupportedException in Gadgeteer

When creating an empty Gadgeteer project and starting it, a System.NotSupportedException is thrown in the Microsoft.SPOT.IO.dll.

Workaround: none needed (ignore exception).

14) Device hangs when deploying and Ethernet cable is plugged in

TCP stack hangs waiting for DHCP if there are multiple devices in the network with the same MAC address.

Workaround: make sure that every device has unique MAC address.