Demo: Developing with .NET and Android on the Nitrogen8M Plus EVK

A New Era for Embedded Development

Not so long ago, embedded development was a highly-specialized domain of expertise that required working with very low level programming languages and with very little in the way of third party support, abstraction layers, or the other conveniences that have been associated with the development of general purpose computing. Embedded operating systems and frameworks were more limited. Working with embedded hardware meant having to have a very intimate knowledge of that hardware. Embedded developers had to be experts in order to even begin to develop applications for that hardware. 

However, over the last few decades, both open source and proprietary solutions have arrived to that problem. The continued development of embedded operating systems such as Windows CE, Linux, and Android have continued to simplify the responsibilities of the embedded developer, creating abstraction layers that allow OEMs to focus on their applications, and not on the underlying hardware. 

Kynetics is a dedicated embedded systems developer with over a decade of experience in delivering over 100 android projects to over 50 satisfied customers. They are a reliable system integration partner who help bring Android support to our customers’ projects, speeding designs to market with a dedicated team of embedded engineers. 

Recently, Kynetics set out to give an overview and demonstrate how to develop applications for Android with .NET Core and MAUI (Multi-Platform App UI), which builds upon the now discontinued Xamarin.Forms. It’s a framework that allows developers to write in .NET via C# and XML, and then deploy to mobile AND desktop application targets. It seeks to allow developers to write application logic that deploys to build targets in the native app logic and UI inherent to those targets. In other words, write your app and deploy it to Android and it will by default look, feel, and behave like an Android app. Do the same to Windows or Mac, and it will do the same for those platforms. 

The result is published in Kynetics’ article “Embedded Development with .NET and Android,” which walks through this process using our Nitrogen8M Plus Evaluation Kit. This kit contains our Nitrogen8M Plus SOM, an ENC carrier board, Basler daA3840 camera, BD070LIC3 7” touch display, serial cable, and power supply. It’s a rich platform for embedded development on NXP’s i.MX8 processor with 4x Cortex-A53 cores at 1.8 GHz and 1x Cortex-M7 Core at 800 MHz. 

Read the article to see how easy it is to get started with .NET MAUI and to deploy to multiple targets. Learn about the growth in Linux and Android that makes them so suitable for embedded projects, especially those that require a beautiful, usable mobile UI. And see how quickly you can go from installing Visual Studio with .NET and the Jetbrains Rider IDE to running and debugging a sample application onboard the Nitrogen8M Plus. 

For more on the Nitrogen 8M Plus, please visit the Nitrogen 8M Plus product page, or see our website for our complete list of system-on-module and single board computer offerings.