sparkfun.com/commerce/produc … ts_id=9797
sparkfun has it (out of stock) but I truly prefer your shop anyway (shipping policy towards Europe is much better than theirs).
Alex from France
Hello.
Thanks for the suggestion; we’ll look into it. Do you have experience with the FEZ Domino, or is your interest based on the product web pages?
I am happy to hear that you prefer our shipping policy to Europe, but if you pick a low-cost option, there is a lot of variability there, so you might just have been lucky with a shipment from us and unlucky with SparkFun. We’re proud of our same-day shipping commitment, but once we hand your package over to the carrier, we don’t have any more control than any other small company.
- Jan
Hello jan,
No, I don’t have any experience at all with the FEZ, today I’m still using old fashioned PIC (ASM and MPLab) and frankly, while it is true that I’m missing division/subtraction/equals I do have the opportunity of debugging in real time (using a Pickit2).
It was one of the drawbacks for using the Arduino. One of my co-workers has it and I must say, yes it is simple to use but the lack of debugging and the lack of available ports (I normally use a 16F876A with a “board” I created myself) was a “no” for me.
I’ve been using .net since 2002 already (not the micro version) at work so I hope the transition would be far more direct than using C or Assembler.
I admit that for time critical things (for example having a very precise timer) I would still use the PIC (it took me 2 years to be able to code correctly, so why give up now?) but for more complicated things (dumping a gps log on a sd card, multi-threading - a feature I manage to substitute more or less successful today by using interrupts, usb host, etc) I think I would prefer having a way of debugging things more neatly than the Arduino.
To be honest, I don’t know the guys behind the project and seeing their reply to various questions (and their attitude) on the sparkfun forum I think they’ll have some problems creating a community like the guys from arduino did (and highlighting once again the gap between Microsoft and “open source”). Still, the board could be a niche product and some old .net coders like me would still buy it.
Alex
Oh, and considering your shipping policy, there are some things to praise:
- same day shipping is great, I can attest to that. SF doesn’t do that
- yes, cheap shipping is risky, but out of 6 orders I think, none got lost (see next point). 2 out of 3 @SF did. And imagine buying 50USD items and paying 50SUSD in shipping: not only you risk of being taxed (taxation is done based on merchandise value + shipping value!) but it’s quite obvious that’s is frustrating to pay 1/2 in shipping.
- you are using standard envelopes, nothing says “electronic components inside, feel free to steal”. SF uses a red big box even for the tiniest of the components. Not only it takes more time (being a package instead of an envelope, takes more time), but you can’t say it’s not tempting for the potential “curious” postal office members.
voila