The Netduino series of boards have been around for several decades and saw a limited level of success for the first decade or so. However, as a development ecosystem they haven't stood the test of time. The original development toolchain has gone into abandonment and been archived. But as a hardware platform, they are a still great boards, especially the Netduino 2 and later, with fully supported mainstream processors. You might not be able to use .Net or C#, but with toolsets from Arduino and STMicroelectronics you can still create amazing things with these easy-to-use Arduino compatible boards. Don't throw them away! The notes below describe how I rediscovered their usefulness, albeit with a different set of tools.

Some History

I've had two Netduino 2's sitting in my electronics box for years, more years than I'm willing to admit. During that time, I'd done very little with them. When I originally bought them, Visual Studio was my daily development environment, and I knew my way around it quite well. I'd tinkered for a bit with an Arduino, but I was eager to use .Net and Visual Studio on this new device. I did build a few things with them, but frankly they didn't grab my interest and at the time, the much more powerful Raspberry Pi was drawing my attention away. So, these boards were relegated to the back of my toolbox. They seemed to be pretty content there, and I kept them cool and dry, so we were all happy for the time being.