I was at the DevNation Hacknight at Red Hat Summit and was given a couple of mbed devices (mbed LPC1768 and mbed Application Board). I have been able to successfully hook them up to my computer and write a couple of small programs that ran (make the leds blink, make a noise, use the rgb led etc).

But I have a couple of newbie questions that hopefully someone can point me in the correct direction.

1.) Can the board only run one application at a time? it seems like if i copy two .bin files onto the board, it doesn't run them both?

2.) I see in the component sections that there are lots of expansion boards (http://mbed.org/components/cat/expansion-boards/) and things, but some of them seem more like they will run with the Arduino platform, and don't hook onto the mbed application board that I got. Can anyone offer some guidance on figuring out what will work with what I already have? The arduino stuff seems interesting, but i enjoy programming in pure c++ so want to stick with the mbed stuff for now.

Thanks in advance, Corey

1. Correct. I guess you come more from a PC background? The .bin file you put on it is the complete software that runs on the device. There is not like on a PC an OS layer below it (unless you specifically add an RTOS in your program, but still then it is your program which makes that OS). What you write is what you get.

2. The arduino shields can also be used with mbeds, those, but way more also have code available but not yet included there. However your application board doesn't have the proper pinout. Now if you want, that isn't a problem, with some wires you can easily connect them. That is also what you will need to do if you want to do something outside the application board, it isn't a standard pinout like arduino pinout, so you will need some wires to connect a component.

@Erik Thanks for your reply, that helped clear things up some. I ordered this book which I think will help me get going and better understand what I can do with these components: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0080977685