Meadow F7 micro board on pre-sale (bare metal .NET Standard 2.0)
In this technical retrospective (2019), @pjmlp shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 92 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 58 comments
This is great. I have a rather large .NET Standard 2.0 library that I've built for VR projects that would be a big boon in IoT devices. It has a large set of unit-of-measure conversions and formatters, some Geospatial features for doing math on LatLngs, audio format decoding, image format decoding, various compression algorithm interfaces, type-safe HTTP requests, and a number of statistical filtering systems such as Kalman filtering of kinematic vectors. It'll be great to be able to reuse all of that code.
And if System.IO.Ports can some day get added to .NET Standard, I've got serial port communication in there too.
The active .NET open source community has been very proactive about upgrading to .NET Standard 2.0. There are a lot of things Microsoft "got right" with 2.0 that are making conversion from .NET Framework a lot easier. For example, my own code (which numbers in the 50kloc range) only took a lite weekend to convert, and most of that was just learning about the new project file format (which is drastically simplified for the better, BTW).
Just wish Microsoft had made their Bluetooth stack a part of .NET Standard instead of jamming it into UWP.
EDIT: I'm having a hard time finding an official spec sheet. Has anyone seen it?
The Dotnet Micro Framework appears to be no longer developed by microsoft, with the official repository being archived [1]. However the Nanoframework[2] fork appears to be alive. Does anyone know which one this project is using? It's unclear from both the OP and the Kickstarter link as well.
[1] https://github.com/NETMF/netmf-interpreter [2] https://nanoframework.net/
.NET is a nice runtime... But I wonder if NodeJS might get more uptake since there is a larger community of javascript/typescript developers out there.
I know hardcore embedded people will hate this idea, but sometimes you have to take the massive performance and memory hit to tempt developers in who prefer to get stuff done with powerful libraries than learn a new language and start worrying about memory management...
It looks pretty nice and the .Net part seems to be pretty good. However the Omega 2+ runs Linux, has twice the Mhz and 4x RAM for much less money... https://onion.io/store/omega2p/ . Perhaps that is why it seems to be sold out at the moment.
Wilderness Labs has some really nice tutorials, if you know nothing about electronics and want to start from the ground up:
https://developer.wildernesslabs.co/Hardware/Tutorials/Electronics/