Windows

MinnowBoard MAX is a Windows* compatible hardware development board that's part of a powerful development system targeted towards hardware developer, IHV, OEM or any other developer that loves to incorporate hardware in their projects and wants the power of a full 64-bit PC. This environment allows you to easily interface to the MinnowBoard MAX on-board peripherals such as Ethernet, HDMI (digital audio + video), USB host, SATA, I2C+SPI, GPIO, PWM and UART.

Windows 8

Once you have your MinnowBoard MAX hardware setup, you can follow these MSDN Development Center instructions that explain what hardware you'll need, how to download the kits and tools to your Windows 7 or 8.1 development system, and how to install Windows and additional Windows drivers. (You'll also find links there for downloading an copy of Windows Embedded 8.1 Industry (x64) Pro Evaluation software.)

On this site, you'll also find information on provisioning the MinnowBoard MAX board for driver deployment and testing, and how to write, build, and deploy a driver, along with sample code.

Windows 10

Windows 10

We recommend that you see our Windows 10 Tutorial on the MinnowBoard.org website for detailed instructions.

You may want to use an external HD for normal OS speeds. Windows 10 should act exactly as you would expect a normal PC to act. You would run through the installer normally, though there are some caveats:

• If you want to install to an SD Card you will need to jump into the firmware and set the SD Card to report itself as non-removable
• You may need to use a usb cdrom drive, sata cdrom drive, or create a installable usb stick based on the installer.

Using Rufus

Rufus is a tool that's used to help simplify the process of creating bootable USB drives. A specific note for using Rufus in installing Windows 10:

• Select "GPT partition scheme for UEFI", which defaults to FAT32
• That will boot, and install, presuming you have a matched bittedness Windows to the firmware on the board (the default is a 64-bit firmware, if you've changed it please make sure the Windows you are installing reflects that firmware)

Windows 10 IoT

We recommend that you see our Windows IoT Tutorial on the MinnowBoard.org website for detailed instructions.

If you already have IoT Core running, you may want to visit the Microsoft IoT Dev website for advanced tutorials and code samples.

Installing to an SD Card

The MinnowBoard MAX / Turbot firmware has the ability to "disable" the removable flag for the SD card, enabling the ability to install to, and boot from, the SD Card for windows. You can find this by getting into the firmware menu (typically gotten to either by F2 or Del during boot, or typing `exit` at the UEFI shell prompt) by navigating to the following option:

   Device Manger ->
       System Setup ->
           South Cluster Configuration ->
               LPSS & SCC Configuration ->
                   ACPI Reporting MMC/SD Media As ->
                       Non-Removable

Accessing I/O

Accessing the low speed I/O is doable from Windows, and we'd suggest taking a look at the example code available at: https://ms-iot.github.io/content/en-US/win10/StartCoding.htm

• Deep Links in to the above:
  • GPIO Blinking an LED in C#
  • SPI Accelerometer Example in C#
  • I2C Accelerometer Example in C#