mbed NXP LPC1768 free samples

[ziq8tsi]

My mbed arrived today.  I connect it up and load the htm file and get:

mbed
mbed is down for scheduled maintenance

mbed is currently down for scheduled maintenance. Please check back later and accept our apologies for the inconvenience.

twitter.com/mbedmicro

To say the least, I would be wary of relying on this cloud compiler stuff in a business environment...

(Granted it is weekend.  Also, on the positive side, it is the only development system I have used that claims full Linux support.)

[baljemmett]

My mbed arrived today.  I connect it up and load the htm file and get:

mbed is down for scheduled maintenance

Eep!  Not a great start...  Mine arrived this morning (spectacularly good timing, as so did the Ethernet breakout board and assorted doohickeys I ordered so I could play with it); luckily I didn't receive that message when I registered this evening.

So far it looks like a very nice piece of kit.  There are some links somewhere on the mbed site to articles describing options for compiling code without relying on the web service (since it's a bare ARM chip from the programming point of view, I imagine there are many ways to build a binary!), but I haven't dug around yet to find out if the mbed APIs can be downloaded for offline compilation.

[logictom]

Eep!  Not a great start...  Mine arrived this morning (spectacularly good timing, as so did the Ethernet breakout board and assorted doohickeys I ordered so I could play with it); luckily I didn't receive that message when I registered this evening.

Can I ask where you got the board? I as looking for one but haven't managed to find anything local.

[baljemmett]

Eep!  Not a great start...  Mine arrived this morning (spectacularly good timing, as so did the Ethernet breakout board and assorted doohickeys I ordered so I could play with it); luckily I didn't receive that message when I registered this evening.

Can I ask where you got the board? I as looking for one but haven't managed to find anything local.

The breakout board?  I grabbed this one from Cool Components -- it comes complete with the magjack, unlike some others (e.g. the SK Pang version).  Since I'm using it on a breadboard and UTP cabling I left the two shield pins out, because otherwise they're rather awkwardly placed, but apart from that it seems to do the job OK.

[logictom]

The breakout board?  I grabbed this one from Cool Components -- it comes complete with the magjack, unlike some others (e.g. the SK Pang version).  Since I'm using it on a breadboard and UTP cabling I left the two shield pins out, because otherwise they're rather awkwardly placed, but apart from that it seems to do the job OK.

Thanks, ordered one along with an SD, USB A and B breakout boards.
Have you managed to get anything up and running with the ethernet?

[David]

Is there a standalone compiler? I have my board but I'm not keen on using an online compiler...call me traditional!

[baljemmett]

Have you managed to get anything up and running with the ethernet?

I've had some success with it; the examples in the Cookbook all worked for me, and I've done some basic stuff of my own but then hit a wall trying to fetch a file from my own web server.  I think that's probably size-related but I haven't had time to play around and sort it yet.  It's on the list for the weekend!

Is there a standalone compiler? I have my board but I'm not keen on using an online compiler...call me traditional!

There are a few discussions on the mbed site about it; the answer seems to be that, although you can use any compiler you like as long as it generates a raw binary, the official route is online-only.  Getting your paws on the mbed libraries to link against may be tricky, although apparently they can be had somewhere (I lost the discussion I saw about that and can't find it again quickly I'm afraid!)  The libraries probably aren't essential, but I guess not using them would leave a fair chunk of donkey work to do yourself.

[rossmoffett]

(2700-3100)
Arrived at work yesterday.  Our Electronics Engineer is jealous, too bad it's Halloween weekend in the US, I'm gonna be out having other fun instead.  Itching to hook it up anyway though, I like the breadboard compatible design and the wiring diagram cards that came with it.

[scrat]

Mine just arrived today. I ordered in the first days of this post, so quite a long time to receive it, even if I'm in the EU.

[allanw]

Well, has anyone shown off what they made with their free mbed yet? No? I'll start off!

As some of you may know from my other post, I've been working on a high power RGB LED driver board and I've finally gotten it to work, after many smoking IC's!

I was originally going to use an Arduino to generate the PWM control signals to do color fading, but it only had two high resolution PWM outputs, and I didn't feel like writing one in software. So I decided to use the mbed instead. It was a pretty good experience. I really enjoy the ease of use of the library.

Anyway, here's a quick video demonstrating my project:



The LED in the video below is really three LED's in series per color, dropping around 10V each at a drive current of 350mA. That's 10W in a small package!

Here's the code: http://mbed.org/users/allanw/programs/rgbfade/lh7h2s/docs/main_8cpp_source.html

I really like being able to use floats freely without worrying too much about execution speed.

[pdunz]

Mine just arrived this morning, took a few weeks but it made it.  Now to get cracking.

[cksa]

just got mine today

so excited.

haven't decided on what project i'd do though. any ideas?

[kek]

I've got my mbed booting up a GameBoy Advance (I did it with a PIC24 already)
http://mbed.org/users/kek/notebook/gameboy-advance-multiboot/

[Hypernova]

If your free sample hasn't arrived yet, don't despair. Mine arrived yesterday and I put my request in pretty quick. I'm in Melbourne Australia.

Regards Wilfred

I'm in Brisbane and I got the notice that it shipped on the 19th last month. Given that my launchpad was stolen when the delivery guys left it at the front door I'm freaking out over the possibility that the mbed met that same fate.

[EDIT]

I walked out the door and it's right there in the mailbox! WOOT!!!

[Hypernova]

Did some quick test on how fast the thing can bit bang by toggling the output pins

32MHz xmega: 16Mb/s
96MHz mbed: 19.2Mb/s

Not sure whether this is due to the library abstraction but compared to clk/2 of the xmega the mbed only managed clk/5. The data sheet for the LPC1768 states "Bit level set and clear registers allow a single instruction to set or clear any number of
bits in one port."

It get's even slower if you actually do want to bit bang entire ports, the speed drops to 12Mb/s or clk/8

[Zad]

Any chance you could disassemble the relevant bit? That does seem quite a lot slower than I would expect, maybe there are flash latency issues?

[Hypernova]

Any chance you could disassemble the relevant bit? That does seem quite a lot slower than I would expect, maybe there are flash latency issues?

This has nothing to do with flash. And trying too look at the asm is not possible since the online compiler doesn't provide them.

IMO it's simply that fact that low level IO access is not exposed (in a micro!?).

Found this mbed forum thread that explains it. http://mbed.org/forum/mbed/topic/584/?page=1

Only small fix appears to be overclocking to 128MHz for a 1/3 increase
http://mbed.org/users/no2chem/notebook/mbed-clock-control--benchmarks/