Morning from ESC Farnborough,

In case you hadn't guessed, mbed is now official! We turned on the website and showed mbed off publicly for the first time at ESC Boson a couple of weeks ago, and got a really great response. Thanks to everyone who came and visited at the stand, and for all the support.

The really great news is that the mbed Microcontroller is now available for pre-order in Digikey and Farnell (see the order page). The price these guys are putting it out for is impressive, and the demand has been higher than we could have imagined, so we're making more batches as fast as we can! The lead time for orders is totally based on supply vs. demand at the moment, and could be up to 6-weeks, but it is basically first come, first served. As long as you know that and you are happy, please go ahead and order one!

• Order an mbed!

On a final note, our twittering billy bass demo was also a bit of a hit :) I'll make sure we write that up properly and give him the credit he is due.

We're now looking forward to seeing what projects people are planning, and working on mbed to improve it to make it even easier for you to try them out!

Thanks,
Simon (on behalf of everyone on the mbed Team)

Hello Beta testers!

We have some really big news. We didn't want to promise too much before it was all set in stone, but we've been working very hard to make mbed *real*, and I think we've done it!

We've teamed up with NXP and have been developing a version of mbed based on their new LPC1768 MCU, which gives us an upgrade to an ARM Cortex-M3 core, so there is even more performance. And best of all, the hardware design is now complete and we've got them going in to production as we speak!

And NXP have invited us to be on their stand at ESC Boston next week, so that means we'll be going live!

NXP are going to be selling these boards through some major distributors too, and they'll be available for pre-order next week.

We'll have a demo there too, and we'll put up a page about it soon, but hopefully it will be interactive :) To give you a hint, here is a little logo I just made:

More info next week, and on our http://twitter.com/mbedmicro feed.

Thanks again to everyone who has helped mbed get this far. Hopefully this is just the beginning!

Simon

You asked for it, you got it. There is now a search engine for mbed!

The search engine is limited in one way however; it does not search within the Handbook or Cookbook. This should hopefully be solved with the next major update.

Also, you can now easily upload images to attach to your forum posts.

To upload an image, just click the image icon at the top of the forum editor box, then click the 'Browse' icon next to the URL field.

As always, feedback is very welcome.

Dan

To support new features, mbed has introduced the concept of usernames. These work exactly as you'd expect. All new signups are now required to choose a username as part of the signup process, and that username can (normally) never be changed.

However, mbed beta tester veterans who registered prior to the recent site upgrade were all assigned usernames in the style "user123456789". Anyone with a username in this format can now change it to a "proper" username.

To grab your username, just head over to your account and choose "Change username".

Note that choosing a new username is completely optional, and will not cause any problems if you don't.

Hi,

This is an update on the site upgrade, which is now complete!

What's changed:

New domain - mbed.org is our new home, which better reflects our increasingly international userbase. mbed.co.uk will continue to work as a redirect for the forseeable future.

You may notice that mbed can now support multiple microcontroller boards, this is because a new board is on it's way!

New servers and architecture. Hopefully mbed should now feel faster than ever, and will have plenty of capacity to support future growth.

And finally, there is a sprinkling of several small improvements and additional features, as well as groundwork laid for future feature additions.

This work is all in preparation for going fully public and opening the whole site to the world, which will happen very soon now. In the meantime, you are now all free to talk about mbed as much as you like! We have put a Tour on the front page (visible to non-logged-in users) which is fully public knowledge, so you can link to that for now if you need to explain to someone what mbed is all about.

If you spot any bugs/problems after the site upgrade, please add them to http://mbed.org/forum/topic/83/

Once again, I should mention I have taken the liberty of turning on site update email notification for all beta testers. If for any reason you wish to opt out of receiving these emails, just untick the box in the My Account area (http://mbed.org/accounts/profile/).

Have fun,

Dan

Good news!

We have been hard at work over the past couple of months, and tomorrow morning (28th August, GMT/UTC) we will be implementing a major upgrade of the mbed website.

You will notice a few differences; most notably the mbed domain will change to mbed.org as opposed to mbed.co.uk, though the latter will still work. There will also be a fair few behind the scenes changes, such as moving to a shiny new server farm.

While we implement the changes and transfer the site to its new home, the website will be unavailable. It shouldn't take more than a couple of hours to complete the move. I will try and keep you updated on the move progress at http://twitter.com/mbedmicro .

After the move is complete, your feedback would be much appreciated, in the forum if possible. This is an essential upgrade ahead of opening the site to the general public, which will happen within a week or two, so if you find anything broken or unclear, let us know! There will doubtless be some wrinkles to be ironed out after the move, so please bear with us.

Finally, I have taken the liberty of turning on site update email notification for all beta testers. If for any reason you wish to opt out of receiving these emails, just untick the box in the My Account area (http://mbed.co.uk/accounts/profile/).

Thanks,

Dan (mbed sysadmin and web developer)

Just to let you know, we have some new stuff on the way. There will be a few hickups as we roll it out i'm sure, so appologies in advance. But here is what is coming, 3) being most important...

1) There is a new board on the way! Same idea, better MCU. Should be (is) very cool. We've made it so the mbed libraries work on it too, so there will be little impact as a user, apart from getting an upgrade. It'll be an Cortex-M3 core btw :)

2) The libraries (and compiler) have changed a lot underneath to let us support two cores with the same MCU library; most of this wont impact anyone, but the main noticable library change that will impact everything (requiring code changes) is pins now use names (enumerations) instead of just numbers (int). i.e.

SPI spi(5, 6, 7); // mosi, miso, sclk

becomes

SPI spi(p5, p6, p7); // mosi, miso, sclk

and the prototype is:

SPI(PinName mosi, PinName miso, PinName sclk);

The main reason to do this is to allow us to also use the underlying pin names of the MCU if desired (e.g. P0_3), which means if you ported your code to a custom PCB you've made with the MCU, you have access to all the MCU pins. It is an annoying change as all code needs to be adapted, but it is a fairly trivial change, and gives some useful features for next-step prototyping on a custom board.

3) We're going public! We've been working hard on the website to enable it to go live properly, and we'll be opening it all up when we put out the new board! So that means the board will be more generally available soon.

I often get questions about how much people can say about mbed, and up until now, the general response has been "not very much". The main reason was, if it didn't work, we wanted to be able to walk away without having made big promises or upsetting anyone, and just be glad we tried.

But the response has been awesome, and the technology far exceeded our early ideas, so there is now no looking back and I'm very happy to say mbed will soon be more public! So that means, when the new site goes live i'm going to lift my "ban" on blogging, flickring, youtubing etc. i.e. you will have permissions to go nuts!

You could probably tell that was coming as we even signed up to twitter :) You can follow us at http://twitter.com/mbedmicro (@mbedmicro).

I'd recommend that anything that gets posted related to mbed should be tagged with "mbed", as that gives us a really nice way for people to search what is going on.

For anyone working on projects that are in a video-able or photograph-able state, it'd be great if you could start posting them to the forum or to us. Last event we did we made a big pinboard of project photos, so it'd be cool to make a bigger one at our next event. So show us what you are up to :)

I'm also looking to feature two or three demos at any events we do; if you've got something cool, make sure you tell us and we'll pick the best three :)

So lots of fun stuff to come; thanks to everyone for your help getting this far.

Happy mbed-ing!

The mbed Compiler just got some updates! There were a collection of fixes to squish some corner case bugs, but also a brand new feature...

You can now expand any libraries in your projects, and the compiler will render the api documentation within them. A picture says a thousand words, so here you go:

This works not only for the core mbed libraries, but also any other libraries people post if they are marked up with the "natural docs" auto-documentation markup.

Hope you like it!

Check it out! Tom Cantrell of Circuit Cellar got hold of one of our prototype mbed Microcontrollers, and he has written an article! It is called Easy (E)mbed - An Alternative Approach to Embedded Programming. That means mbed is in print!

UPDATE: It is in the June #227 issue, which you can buy online at http://www.mygazines.com/issue/988. You can also read just this article if you go to the bottom of http://www.circuitcellar.com/magazine/, where there is a pdf with corrections from the printed article.

Looks like it might be time to start openning up the mbed Beta :) If you know people who might be interested in getting involved, you can now point them at http://mbed.co.uk/beta.

Great stuff!