We've just put live the new mbed Cookbook, a fully-integrated wiki that provides a community repository for building blocks and tutorials to help get prototypes up and running even faster. Here are the details...

The new mbed Cookbook

The cookbook is the place for community contributed reusable building blocks, reference and tutorials. Think of it as the community Handbook; anything that can be reused or referenced to help someone cook up their project.

For example, it's the place to document a library, pinout, and code examples for a useful component that others can use. Or a reference of how to hook up an mbed to your favourite web api or programming language.

The cookbook is a wiki, editable by any user. It is fully integrated into the rest of the mbed site, so all the content is searchable and taggable. You can also comment on wiki pages to discuss the content.

Contributing to the cookbook

All users are very welcome to dive in and start editing and creating pages in the new cookbook. Don't worry if you're not sure how to lay something out, just have a go and it can be refined over time.

As a guide, the aim is to be a definitive guide to lots of components. That means a page is likely to be about the component, not what you are doing with it (e.g. how to get component x working rather than here is a project that uses w, x, y to do z). For projects you are working on and the development of libraries, the notebooks are still the place to journal your progress. Hopefully, many useful cookbook pages can be extracted from the findings of these notebook projects.

So if you've worked out how to get a widget or gizmo connected to mbed, have a go at writing it up and see if it helps anyone else.

Future plans

As early adopters will remember, we put up the original cookbook a while back as a test, and it was incredibly successful. But it wasn't very integrated in to the site (search, editing, etc) and quickly showed signs of scaling badly as people were using it for documenting everything and anything, and that meant varying quality too.

So that is when we decided to introduce the Notebook concept, to provide a place for project notes. That has also had a great pickup, so we're really happy with this newer model; Notebooks for user projects and personal logs, the Cookbook for more reusable building blocks.

The cookbook and the wiki engine we now have in place means not only can we open up this community repository once again in a much more integrated and searchable way, but we also plan to move over to the wiki markup as the default way of creating content throughout the rest of the site, including the forum. We'll also use it internally for the handbook, so that becomes properly searchable too. There's a lot of other exciting features that now become possible thanks to the new wiki system - so watch this space!

So now go dive in, and share your hard work that others could make use of: mbed.org/cookbook/.

Have fun!