Coming Soon!


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!

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