mbed

After you've finished building a prototype with mbed and have progressed to spinning your own custom product PCB using the LPC1768, the same program binary can just work on it too; the .bin files really are just a raw ARM binary images for the LPC1768 chip.

But you'll need a way to get it in to the microcontrollers FLASH. It looks like <<user daugihao="">> has been busy and written some code that turns your mbed in to a drag-n-drop programmer to drive the LPC1768 chip's bootloader, so you can use an mbed to program your custom board!

You can see his full write-up in the cookbook:

• http://mbed.org/cookbook/lpc-bootloader

Looks like it could be very useful!

We've put up a couple of new features on the beta site for anyone interested in some early access testing:

• Editor Tabs - for switching between open files you are editing
• Advanced Find - to search across all files within your project

Editor Tabs

The file editor now supports tabs, making it simple to switch between files you are currently editing. Hopefully pretty self explanatory.

Advanced Find

The find functionality has now been extended, so you can search beyond the current file.

Having enabled the Find bar (Toolbar icon, or Ctrl-F), there is now an "Advanced" button. Hit that and you'll get the Advanced Find in Files window:

This enables you to search across multiple files and filetypes; for example, across your whole program. When you search, the reuslts will appear as a list in the compiler output window where you can jump to any of them with a click:

To try it out, just enable http://mbed.org/betamode/. I'm sure there are still a few bugs to iron out, so please fire any reports at the forum as per normal.

Hopefully some useful features to enhance your coding pleasure...

Pololu have just released an mbed-based 3pi robot. Take a look at this:

These robots are great; very fast, and nice and robust too. And now with the power of mbed and peripherals like the USB Host interface, this should make it a superb platform for AI and wireless remote control robot experiments, whether you want to get deeply in to embedded code or just remote control it from your favourite PC language.

A component to note is the USB-A socket; this connects to the mbed USB host, and means you can plug in USB Disks (e.g. for route instructions) or even USB bluetooth dongles for wireless remote control via PC, Phone or even Wii Remote:

• Controlling an m3pi with a Wii Remote

You can even control the robot over bluetooth using RPC (Remote Procedure Calls), allowing it to be controlled from a PC using your favourite programing language without having to write any embedded code:

• http://mbed.org/cookbook/m3pi-RPC

You can see all the features of the board here:

This platform should have lots of possibilities. For more details, see the mbed Cookbook page and the Pololu website:

• http://mbed.org/cookbook/m3pi
• http://www.pololu.com/catalog/product/2151

Looking forward to seeing how this gets used!

After a very successful beta, the mbed Compiler now officially supports built-in workspace Version Control!

You'll now see new "Commit" and "Revisions" buttons in the toolbar, and driving it should be pretty self explanatory, especially for those familiar with DVCS such as git or mercurial.

Here is the video that shows how you get started:

For anyone who missed the beta introduction, here are the main details:

Overview

You can use the version control features to let you version, branch and merge code, with a nice representation of the state of your project history:

The approach we're taking should be familiar to those of you with experience of distributed version control models (as used by mercurial/git); each program has its own local repository, so you can commit and perform actions on it within your own workspace (such as updating, branching, showing changes).

The main things you can do so far include:

• Commit a version of your project, and view the revision history
• View changes a version made, and compare changes between versions
• Update or revert to a different version
• Branch and merge

Note that you can't do any collaboration aspects with this yet; no pulling, pushing, named branches etc; it is all just local to your workspace project for now. But you can guess what we're working on next...

The Basics

Your program, as before, is the "Working Copy". You can "Commit" changes to its local repository to create new "Revisions". You can see the changes between your current working copy to the previous revision, and changes between revisions.

You can choose to "Update" to a particular revision, which updates your working copy to that revision (e.g. a state of your program in the past). This is the way you can "Branch"; do some commits, update to a previous revision, do some more commits; you now have two branches of development derived from a common revision.

You can then "Merge" a revision, often the head of one branch, in to your working copy. This creates a working copy that is the merge of these two branches, and when you commit, your back to one (less) branch of development.

There is also the option to "Discard" your working copy, and "Revert" your working copy to a particular revision; unlike "Update", this creates a working copy with the changes you need to get back to that previous state, more like an "undo" than a branch.

We hope you find this useful!

A snapshot of something currently on the mbed whiteboard...

This is a first sketch of an idea for a really small experiment/workshop board. The basic aim is to pack a board full of interesting components that use the different interfaces of the mbed, and that can be used for experiments in labs and workshops.

Alex Louden published his design for a breakout board the size of a business card a while back, so when we decided to look at a self-contained experimenter board, it seemed a shame not to try and continue the trend!

Easy to draw on a board, but now Ioannis is working out if we really can cram that 0.5m drawing down to a PCB the size of a business card! We'll tell you how it goes...