We've put live a version of the mbed library with some new features and some behavioural improvements. The main highlights are:

• Increased speed of the DigitalIn, DigitalInOut and DigitalOut interfaces
• Open Drain mode available for DigitalIn and DigitalInOut
• New PortIn, PortInOut and PortOut interfaces to writing quickly to a number of pins on a port

Here are the full details...

Digital I/O

Based on some feedback, we've improved the behaviour of the Digital I/O interfaces:

The DigitalIn, DigitalInOut and DigitalOut classes have been optimised to improve performance (see Igor Skochinsky's excellent analysis in http://mbed.org/users/igorsk/notebook/fast-gpio-with-c-templates/). Reads are at about 2x previous speeds, DigitalOut's speed is over 5x as fast, and DigitalInOut's write is over 4x as fast. Also there is now no overhead between using the assignment, or the read/write methods. This also means Bus I/O, which is built on these, is faster too.

DigitalIn and DigitalInOut now also has an open drain option via the mode() method (as requested in http://mbed.org/forum/mbed/topic/178/)

DigitalInOut od(p21);
od.mode(OpenDrain);

Ports

We've added PortIn, PortInOut and PortOut classes to complement the Digital I/O and Bus I/O interfaces. The main distinction is:

• Digital I/O allows you to easily access any single digital pin
• Port I/O allows you to access pins on an underlying MCU port, specified by the port ID and a bit mask
• Bus I/O allows you to construct a "virtual port" made up of any pins in any bit position

The Bus I/O is the most flexible way to create a collection of pins that can be written in one go, but at the cost of performance; it is really just a collection of Digital I/O pins that are written to one after the other. For performance, writing to multiple pins on a Port I/O is much better, and has similar performance to a single Digital I/O pin. The downside vs Bus I/O is less flexibility of pin selection and layout.

When you create a Port class, you give the constructor the port name, and a mask which indicates which bits of that port are going to be active. You then read from or write to the 32-bit port, with each bit indicating the pin on the port. The class ignores the bits which are for pins you set as '0' in the mask. This has the nice property that multiple Port interfaces can coexist on the same physical port.

Here is an example:

#include "mbed.h"

// LED1 = P1.18  LED2 = P1.20  LED3 = P1.21  LED4 = P1.23

PortOut leds(Port1, 0x00B40000);   // the mask indicates which bits are considered part of the port

int main() {
    while(1) {
        leds = 0x00A00000;
        wait(1);
        leds = 0x00140000;
        wait(1);
    }
}

There are obviously only some pins of ports available, but there is an 8-bit bus available which could be useful for parallel interfaces:

       +----------+
GND   -+ 1     40 +- Vout
      -+ 2     39 +-    
      -+ 3     38 +-     
      -+ 4     37 +-    
P0.9  -+ 5     36 +-
P0.8  -+ 6     35 +-
P0.7  -+ 7     34 +-
P0.6  -+ 8     33 +-
P0.0  -+ 9     32 +-
P0.1  -+ 10    31 +-
P0.18 -+ 11    30 +- P0.4
P0.17 -+ 12    29 +- P0.5
P0.15 -+ 13    28 +- P0.10
P0.16 -+ 14    27 +- P0.11
P0.23 -+ 15    26 +- P2.0
P0.24 -+ 16    25 +- P2.1
P0.25 -+ 17    24 +- P2.2
P0.26 -+ 18    23 +- P2.3
P1.30 -+ 19    22 +- P2.4
P1.31 -+ 20    21 +- P2.5
       +----------+ 

LED1   LED2   LED3  LED4
P1.18  P1.20  P1.21 P1.23   

Other Tweaks

Here are some of the other tweaks that made it in...

• set_time() now also clears the RTC sub-second counter; reported in http://mbed.org/forum/helloworld/topic/700/
• calling time() now starts the RTC running if it isn't already (so you get relative timing, even if no absolute time is set)
• PwmOut: changing the period now maintains the duty cycle for that PWM; reported in http://mbed.org/forum/mbed/topic/513/
• The baudrate method for Serial now does a full fractional baud rate calculation to provide the optimum settings for any baudrate requested.

To get these updates for existing programs, simply click on the mbed library in your compiler project and choose "Update to latest revision!". Any problems, suggestions or thumbs ups, please tell us in the Bugs/Suggestions forum!

That's it for this library update. We do have some more new features and improvements that are in the works now, which hopefully will get to you soon.