[Updated 2:30 pm, PST] — Microsoft has developed a tiny new software platform dubbed “.NET Embedded” that implements a skinny subset of the .NET Framework on bare metal, according to a story at WindowsForDevices. The software stack, developed for use in SPOT wristwatches and other “smart personal objects,” will become available to hobbyists and experimenters this week as part of a development kit from startup .netcpu Corporation. The $500 kit includes a tiny chip-like board containing the SPOT embedded processor and 4MB flash, Microsoft's .NET Embedded SDK with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1, and a prototyping carrier board (a $200 kit, without the carrier board, is due out by year end).

With 4MB of Flash and 384KB of RAM, the .netcpu module appears to have sufficient resources to run uClinux, based on analysis of uClinux's minimum requirements by maintainers Greg Ungerer and David McCullough. However, it turns out that the tiny board's 4MB Flash is accessed via an SPI (serial peripheral interface) on the tiny board's SoC, so it's not very useful for anything but data or program access at fairly low rates. But, who knows — perhaps someone in the OSS community will come up with an “embedded Mono” to run on the tiny module!

Check out the WindowsForDevices article for more details on both the hardware and software.

 
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