Bryan, can you address the elephant in the room for a lot of netduino (ex)users? Questions:
Did you buy the rights from Chris Walker?
Does he have any further involvement whatsoever with netduino?
You’re going to get a lot of grief here once Agent backers (I was one such sucker) start finding out about this. It’s probably better to nip it in the bug :).
Thx.
I would also like to know what happened. I am happy that someone took over though.
We didn’t acquire anything to do with the Agent Watch. I was also disappointed that it never shipped, as I had a personal interest in it; when it was announced, I was still at Xamarin, and I did some work to get it working with Xamarin stuff. That’s actually how Monkey.Robotics started. I even did talks on it.
Chris doesn’t have any relationship or involvement in Wilderness Labs. I always really loved the Netduino. I got my start in microcontrollers with the BS2 stamp from parallax and then Arduino, and when Netduino came out, I fell in love with it. After the watch meltdown happened at Secret Labs, Chris and I were catching up, and he off-handedly mentioned that they were going to have to sell it (Netduino) off, which was the genesis of the idea around Wilderness Labs.
I had an idea for a connected things platform and acquiring Netduino served two functions, firstly, it meant that it didn’t disappear to the rubbish bin of tech history, when there was still a lot of love (and demand) for it. And two, it serves as a natural path forward for what we’re up to.
My hope with Netduino is that it truly becomes a community owned and supported platform. To that end, we’ve open sourced everything that we’ve done around it, and already the community has stepped up to help out. While a lot of folks got burned on the Agent Watch kickstarter, I think that the goodwill here is evident, and that it’s obvious we have nothing to do with it, or Secret Labs, other than acquiring the Netduino brand from them.
-b
Hello!
Makes a bigger sense to me. I got my start typically bolting raw logic together to do something bigger. Then both of the basic stamps as well, I still use the BS2 for a lot of simple projects.
I found out about the original Netduino design during the arrival of the Maker Faire to NYC. Chris and I hit it off like anything. (I still have photos of that, but its on another drive.) Also found out about the Dot-Net Micro Edition via their blog at RS Microsoft and followed up with Chris about it at both the original Maker Faire launch, and then sadly at the one where he had both the watch out and the mainstay of his efforts out.We both found it interesting that the Dot-Net Micro Edition was originally launched for a watch effort that the research arm of Microsoft looked at, and did nothing else with.
Then when his failed, the site suddenly took a downward spiral. About time you both arrived there, Bryan (I think) and simultaneously the site here launched, everything managed to get better.
As a good friend once said, “I like to think there are always possibilities.”
Incidentally I did sample the Arduino, and shelved it, and every few months I try it again, and shelve it.
And Bryan when all of you did indeed acquiring the Netduino brand from them. you took the design in exactly the direction the old firm would have wanted.
