Netduino Measurement Electronics: hardware and software

This book is thought of as the practical guide which can help the C# developers to build measurement and control systems based upon popular Netduino boards. The guide is aimed to provide an introduction to interfacing the Netduino platform to measurement and control electronic circuits.
Many measurement systems process analog signals, so the guide contains the brief theory and practical applications dedicated to use of popular high-resolution analog-to-digital converters. The material of the book also covers digital signal synthesis using digital potentiometers and digital-to-analog converters. The readers will find practical designs of digitally programmable wide-band square wave oscillators and PWM circuits. The guide also describes practical aspects of interfacing and programming high-precision wide-band sinusoidal, triangular and rectangular waveform generators using a popular high-resolution Direct Digital Synthesizer (DDS) chips. Frequently we need to measure a frequency (period) of periodical signals, so the guide contains examples of measuring a frequency of digital and analog signals using high-precision Frequency-To-Voltage converters.
The material of this book assumes that the readers are familiar, at least, with basics of designing and assembling electronic circuits. For most projects having some basic skill in electronics will serve the readers well and allow them to understand what is going on behind the scenes. Each project represented in this guide comprises both hardware and software parts with detail explanation of how the stuff works; the C# source code accompanies the schematic circuit of every project in this book. The readers can easily improve or modify every project described in the guide if needed.
All projects were designed and tested using the Netduino Plus 2 board running .NET Micro Framework 4.2. The readers can easily adapt each project to any Netduino board upgraded to v.4.2. The software was designed using Microsoft Visual C# 2010 Professional, although the free Microsoft Visual C# Express 2010 can be applied as well.