The HERO is a Gadgeteer main board that features the .NET Micro Framework. This powerful development platform allows users to program and debug using Visual Studio 2015 C#. This open hardware platform features 8 Gadgeteer ports that may be connected to a variety of Gadgeteer modules supporting SPI, I2C, UART/USART, SD Card, Analog, GPIO, PWM and a Talon SRX emulation port. The HERO also features dual wire CAN, USB host and USB device.

http://www.ctr-electronics.com/control-system/hro.html

Yes, HERO typically is used as an inexpensive robot controller. The wireless gamepad support and native support of CTRE CAN devices also allows for expedient development of robot applications.

Yes, the development board is NETMF (C#) based, and supports a variety of IO options for display, sensors, physical interface, etc...

• Developing robot platforms (land-based vehicles, robot arm, process lines, etc...) without a major price investment.
• Inexpensive replacement for control systems on existing robots should original control system need to be repurposed or replaced.
• Open source API for learning about CAN bus and how to integrate CTRE CAN devices into custom applications.

Visual Studio NETMF examples supporting the HERO Development Board These examples will be periodically merged into CTRE's HERO-SDK-Installer, in which case they will appear in Visual Studio's New Project Dialog Box.

-Install Visual Studio 2015.
-Install and run the latest HERO-SDK-Installer.
-Run the NetmfVS14.vsix file located in the install path of the SDK.

Full instructions for software install can be found in Section 6 of the HERO User's Guide.

HERO User's Guide and SDK-Installer can be found at... http://www.ctr-electronics.com/hro.html#product_tabs_technical_resources

This is a HERO port of the TCP/IP networking examples utilizing mIP, an open-source managed TCP/IP stack written in C#. This was tested using an ENC28J breakout on Port 1. Original code: http://mip.codeplex.com/