Get an mbed!
mbed fest 2012 was held on the 29th January 2012 at Akihabara Network and Embedded Technology Centre in Japan.
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Tedd OKANO attended the event and has shared great write up of the day:
Tedd OKANO wrote: This was second mbed user meeting held in Japan after the initial mbed fest in October 2010.
There were 21 attendees and 5 presenters and it was very nice user meeting and exciting experience for all. We also arranged a live stream the event, allowing others to remotely enjoy the meeting as well.
The user meeting began with a video message from the mbed team in the UK. It was great to find out what is going on with mbed.org, and we expect a lot in future!
There were six presentations
eichi kowata : “Geiger Counter Kit and its prototype board”
Shinji Tadenuma : “BlackOne” an all-in-one mbed/LPCXpresso baseboard
Dairyo Gokan : “NANDethno Pocket mbed” a base board for mbed
Junichi Katsu (who hosted this event) : “mbed and I”
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Additionally, three people presented their projects in lightning-talk sessions
Yuji Notsu : Geiger Counter project and measurement results
Kenta Saito : mbed Sound Synthesizer
Junichi Nagayama : Timeline printer using mbed (automatic printing of tweets with specified hash tag)
A beginners hands-on session was also done. Five people experienced how easy it is to start development and make a prototype quickly.
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At the end of the user meeting – we held a lottery. Many prizes were given out including, 5 blue mbeds, 5 yellow mbeds, base boards, custom made M0 boards with LPCXpresso, RJ45 connectors with cables and a book of mbed primers. All prizes we’re kindly are provided from mbed team, NXP, and presenters.
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After the meeting, we had a gathering (beer) party. Time flies so quickly.
I hope to have next meeting soon.
Thanks Okano-san for a great write-up and Mr. Junichi Katsu for sponsoring mbed fest 2012!
To see more, you can find recorded footage of the event online - Part1 and Part2 and an image gallery
One of our mbed developers, Luc Smeesters , is an active ham radio operator. He contacted us last year with an idea to run a competition to explore how microcontrollers could be applied to ham radio applications. It sounded like a great idea, so we sponsored him with a bit of mbed kit for prizes and in conjunction with the publication "QSP Revue", a competition was born. Here is a great summary from Luc of the results of what became the first "QSP Revue mbed Ham Radio Contest"
There are currently millions of ham radio (amateur radio) users around the world. These fellows are motivated by all techniques and technologies that enhance all forms of radio communications.
Belgian French Radio Amateur publication QSP Revue ran a contest, sponsored by mbed and Plantronics, to use an mbed microcontroller in a ham radio application.
Contestants were asked to submit a proposal for a project suitable for a ham application. A jury of independent amateur radio users judged the feasibility and appropriateness of the project and the most appealing proposals received an mbed to develop their projects. The contestants were also required to produce all the necessary documentation to allow other ham fellows to produce their own prototypes of the described application.
DTMF Generator - A solution to control specific ham radio applications (Web communication, radio relay control) using sound signals such as those used in telephony. QSP Revue Mai 2011
OUFTI1- A cubesat (10x10x10 cm satellite) housing a DSTAR communication satellite communication relay. This was an academic project supported by ESA (European Space Agency). This project was aimed at deciphering the OUFTI1 data stream affected by the Doppler Effect (a frequency shift due to moving objects). QSP Revue Août 2011
CW-Box - A dedicated communication switching system that implements the appropriate switching delays in various communication equipment configurations.QSP Revue Juillet 2011
DSTAR Decoder - An mbed-based protocol conversion system to decode the DSTAR protocol which is usually only supported by one manufacturer. This allows standard ham transceiver equipment to transmit and receive digital voice, data and images via this protocol. The project not only achieved efficient support of the DSTAR protocol, it also opens this communication channel through existing and cheaper means.QSP Revue Juin 2011
Although the number of projects was limited by restricted C/C++ programming knowledge, the contest has generated plenty of interesting content in the QSP Revue throughout the year. When the OUFTI1 satellite is operational (launch expected end of this year), interest in DSTAR communication will rise and the offered mbed solutions will lead to more implementations and discoveries in this field.
Luc Smeesters – Radio Amateur Station ON4ZI
Thanks Luc!
If you have news, projects, or stories that you think we should blog about please email us at support@mbed.org
We're putting together a little demo using the new mbed NXP LPC11U24. Here are a couple of shots of it in prototype:
Can you guess what it is yet? :)
We're working on it for Embedded World, so if we pull it off you should be able to see it on NXP's stand. Fingers crossed!
btw. ARM will also be displaying some demos based on the mbed NXP LPC11U24; we've got two lined up already, but one slot is still free so if you have a project that could make a great demo, get in touch!
Jim Carver, Technical Director of Advanced Processor Architectures at Avnet Electronics, has just sent us a link to an interesting presentation he put together about migrating an existing 8051 based NXP RGB LED board to the ARM Cortex-M0 using the new mbed LPC11U24 microcontroller.
Jim describes how he used mbed to port the existing 8051 code to the Cortex-M0. He then goes on to add a USBHID interface using the mbed USB librariesto add control from a custom PC GUI "in a snap"!
He then also makes use of another one of our new features; exporting his code developed using the online mbed compiler to the offline Keil µVision4 tool suite, for enhanced debug support offered by the enterprise toolchain. Here he optimises his solution to use the built-in NXP USB ROM drivers allowing him to improve the code size.
We liked Jim's closing comments too! "mbed is a truly innovative solution for engineers needing a fast simple solution for evaluating system prototyping proof of concept" and "moving from mbed to µVision4 was fast and debugging with the µVision4 debugger was a snap".
Thanks to Jim for sharing this presentation; you can find it here:
Our first batch of the mbed NXP LPC11U24 Microcontroller are now officially available! Order one here!
This latest mbed is designed for prototyping USB devices, battery powered applications, and 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0 designs, and will be a great little brother to our existing mbed NXP LPC1768 Microcontroller.
Here are the specifications, some of the libraries we've built for you, and some examples of it in action:
See the mbed NXP LPC11U24 handbook page to find out all the details.
This mbed is great for prototyping USB devices. The LPC11U24 is a very low-cost chip, but you get built in USB device and a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0 core, so it can be the basis for all sorts of designs.
We've already implemented libraries for the following USB interfaces that you can build on:
We've got Hello World examples showing how to use them, so you can just concentrate on writing your USB applications; here are a couple of examples:
| USB Keyboard | USB MIDI |
You can see all the details on the USB Devices and how to use them on the handbook page:
The mbed NXP LPC11U24 includes many other interfaces too, all supported in the mbed C++ SDK:
All the details can be found in the mbed Handbook.
One really nice feature is that most of the contributed libraries in the mbed Cookbook for accelerometers, sensors, actuators, LCDs etc will work out of the box too.
As they use the mbed SDK libraries, you just have to use the latest mbed SDK and compile them for the different target, and they should spring in to life; no code changes needed!
To get hold of one of this first batch, take a look at our order page to find a distributor!
If you want to understand more, why not take the mbed Tour
We'll be at Embedded World with some demos where we plan to announce full availability; if you are around, come and say hi!
And if you get your hands on one of these first batch and are building something that could be a great demo, get in touch as we've still got one demo slot left on our stand to fill. Just give us an email at support@mbed.org with the details and we might choose it to display along side ours :)
