The mbed is here, along with his brother...

By -
Yesterday my mbed arrived from Farnell/Element14, ready for me to road-test. It was accompanied by an LPCXpresso board which I'd ordered from Farnell at 6pm the evening before. Amazing!

I'm posting my first impressions of the mbed on the element14 website, but it's worth posting a quick comparison of the two products here.

Getting started with the mbed

 The mbed really is as easy to get going as the website suggests; the cloud-based compiler means that there is no software setup for you do do. Fantastic!

Here's all you have to do to get started:
  1. Connect your mbed to your PC using the supplied micro USB connector. This opens a USB storage device.
  2. Click on MBED.HTML and register.
  3. Download the HelloWorld.bin program.
  4. Copy to the mbed's file folder.
  5. Press reset on the mbed and watch its LED blink. Job done!
This took less than 60 seconds; another 60 and I'd compiled my own variant of hello world, downloaded and ran it.

There are lots of easy-to-use libraries on the mbed website, with plenty of sample code to steal reuse and modify.

Getting started with the LPCXpresso

The LPCXpresso uses Code Red's extended version of the Eclipse IDE driving the GNU gcc compiler.

Installation takes a few minutes; during the process, you'll need to request an activation key, which arrives by email. For me, this was almost instantaneous.

I've been using Eclipse for longer than I care to remember, and I found the development environment very familiar. If you haven't used Eclipse before, there's a good tutorial in the getting started guide. Eclipse can be a little daunting, but it's worth the effort. The development environment includes a JTAG debugger, which I suspect is gong to be a real time-saver.

Like the mbed, the LPCXpresso has n extensive set of libraries. These are provided by Code Red, and cover a wide range of the NXP ARM peripherals.

It's going to take me a while to explore the two development environments. My first mbed project is shaping up to be embarrassingly quick to implement; I'll publish details here when it's ready. After that I'm going to port my Arduino microwriter-clone keyboard code to the two ARM environments.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Controlling a Raspberry Pi Pico remotely using PySerial

By -
Image
Update : I'm using thie code below in another project, and found that I had not correctly fixed the reported bug. The new version passes automated tests, and I am pretty sure it works OK. I have changed the name of the class to Talker  since it can both send and receive information. Apologies to all concerned for the bug! Introduction You can use a Raspberry Pi Pico as a powerful peripheral to a host - a Raspberry Pi, a Jetson Nano, a laptop or workstation. In this article you'll see how to interact with a Pico running MicroPython or CircuitPython by writing some Python code that runs on the host. The software is easy to use. It enables you to send a Python statement to the Pico and read the results. The statement can be any valid MicroPython code. Setting up the host and the Pico For this article I've used a Raspberry Pi as the host, but any computer running Windows, Linux or Mac OS will do so long as it has Python 3.5 or later installed. In particular, you can use this t...
Read more

Five steps to connect Jetson Nano and Arduino

By -
Image
Yesterday's post showed how to link a micro:bit to the Jetson Nano. One of the members of the (unofficial) NVIDIA Jetson Nano group on Facebook asked about connecting an Arduino to the Jetson. Here's a simple recipe for getting data from the Arduino to the Jetson Nano. It should work on all the Jetson models, not just the Nano, but I only have Nanos to hand. On request, I've added a recipe at the end of this post which sends data from the Jetson Nano to the Arduino; it turns the default LED on the Arduino on or off. The recipe for sending data from the Arduino to the Jetson has just 5 stages: Program the Arduino. (I used the ASCIITable example). Connect the Arduino to the Jetson using a USB connector Install pyserial on the Jetson Download a three-line Python script Run the script.   Programming the Arduino I used an Arduino Uno, and checked it on a verteran Duemilanove (above), but any Arduino should work. You'll need to do this step usi...
Read more

Raspberry Pi Pico project 2 - MCP3008

By -
Image
This post show you how to drive the MCP3008 8-channel ADC using a Raspberry Pi Pico. I'll start with a personally embarrassing and annoyingly relevant story. I'll also tell you about a minor 'gotcha' when using SPI on the Pico, and how you can avoid it. Finally, I've include the code and fritzing diagram I used to test the interface. First, the story. Back in 2012, when the Raspberry Pi was fresh and new, I was running a startup called Quick2Wire.  We made add-on boards for the Pi. Just before Christmas we sent out our first batch of boards to a small army of beta-testers. The beta boards didn't work. Somehow a single trace on the pcb had got deleted and one of the GPIO pins was isolated. The boards were still usable and it wasn't too hard to solder in a jumper wire to replace the missing trace, but it was very embarrassing. It wasn't just that we'd shipped boards with a defect. The really annoying thing was that I'd set up an  automated loop-bac...
Read more