microsoft visual studio 2017 for alliance developer kit.

Adafruit, the electronics learning superstore founded by Limor 'Ladyada' Fried, provides all sorts of peripherals for these boards, along with its own line of lightweight Feather development boards.

These environments all have extensive community support and are ready to plug in to a huge number of ready-made external sensors, motors, servos and whatever else you might imagine. Some better-known microcontroller devices include Arduino, BeagleBoard and Raspberry Pi. (I played a bit with the SensorTag development kit and it's a lot of fun, making me think the Watch DevPack might be a great learning toolset, too.) At a very low level you have a variety of simple 16- and 32-bit devices from a variety of traditional chip makers like Texas Instruments. There's a huge and growing universe of off-the-shelf, programmable, networkable microcontroller devices available now. These days getting started can be as easy as picking up an Arduino and writing a few lines of script.

Once upon a time these were specialized embedded processors requiring electronics know-how and proprietary languages. Generally speaking, however, what I want to address here is the ability to program a huge and growing world of lightweight computing environments. Many of these devices include the ability to access the Internet - it opens a world of possibilities, but also a world of new security threats - hence, the _Internet_ of things. The 'Internet of Things' (IoT) is a bit of a loaded phrase these days. All containing tiny computers, and all interconnected via the Internet. Thermostats, security cameras, locks and lights, vacuum cleaners. It seems like every electronic device today features not only computing power, but wireless connectivity, as well.

Microsoft visual studio 2017 for alliance developer kit.