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Showing posts from July, 2010

Three cheers for Element14 and the mbed!

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I heard a couple of days ago that Element14 are sending me an mbed to road-test. Element14 is the online electronic design community sponsored by Premier Farnell . They organised the excellent Eagle course that I attended a few weeks ago. They also run a road-test programme where manufacturers donate interesting hardware for lucky designers to try out and review. I declared my interest in trying the mbed a few weeks ago, but so did the rest of the world; just about anyone who's involved with embedded systems would want to try out this neat product. The mbed is an ARM-based component for rapid prototyping of microcontroller applications. It's fully featured but very compact. It comes with extensive libraries, and its free development tool chain is online. Setting up and maintaining a development tool chain tends to be expensive or fiddly, so zero setup and zero cost are a big plus. I'm hoping that the mbed will arrive tomorrow. When it does I'll be reportin