If you like making things, then you will love .NET Gadgeteer. You can create many interesting projects by just plugging together components and writing a few lines of programming code.
The .NET Gadgeteer system is developed by Microsoft to allow people to build small electronic projects. The modules that are available all conform to the .NET Gadgeteer standard, but are created by various different manufacturers. The most important of these components is the Mainboard. This is the board that contains the processor chip that will drive all the other components that we attach to it.
One of the most popular Gadgeteer systems is the FEZ Spider (shown in Figure 1-1), which is available as part of a kit of components with everything you need to get started. The kit includes a mainboard, a camera, multicolor LEDs, a color touch screen, a joystick, and various means of connecting to other computers and the Internet.
To build the projects in this book, you will need to buy one of these kits, which are available from a number of different sources. Just type “Fez Spider Starter Kit” into your favorite search engine.
All the components of the Starter Kit are plugged together using short leads with connectors on each end. These are supplied as part of the kit. This means that the projects can be constructed without the need for any soldering.
We can plug together hardware as much as we like, but it will not do anything until we have programmed the Mainboard. The Mainboard can be thought of as the brain of the system and all the other components are attached to the mass of connectors on the top of the board. And, with everything plugged in, it does resemble a spider of the kind of dimensions normally found only in South American jungles.
You program a Gadgeteer Mainboard by attaching it to your computer using a USB lead and running Microsoft’s Integrated Development Environment called Visual Studio C# Express. One of the really nice features of Gadgeteer is that Visual Studio will let you do a lot of the programming just by drawing diagrams (see Figure 1-2).
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