The Arm Mbed team is delighted to announce the release of Mbed OS 6, our first major release in almost four years. We have invested heavily to add the features required for today’s IoT devices, and to back those features up with state of the art tooling to simplify development of IoT and embedded products. You can use Mbed OS 6 now in Mbed Studio, the Mbed Online Compiler, Mbed CLI and directly from the Mbed OS GitHub repository.

This blog covers:

• Stable and mature APIs
• Board support for the most popular boards
• Custom hardware
• Community supported boards
• Bare Metal Profile
• Cloud services support

Stable and mature APIs

Today’s release lays down the foundations for the next wave of innovation in IoT, providing a set of developer APIs that are fit-for-purpose, validated by widespread use in IoT products, and supported for the long term to ensure stability. We have implemented a new API lifecycle that gives you more visibility and confidence in the maturity of our public APIs, and the first APIs to carry the ‘Experimental’ label are released in Mbed OS 6.

Board support for the most popular boards

We have worked closely with many of our valued Mbed partners to migrate the most widely used developer boards to support Mbed OS 6 at launch. Our partners will add more boards in our ongoing monthly releases.

Custom hardware

One of the major areas of improvement from our most recent Mbed Developer Survey is our support for custom hardware. This is a key workflow for those of you taking your IoT device concepts from prototype to production and we’ve added a new concept, the custom board, to support you in this. We are working on expanding this further and will announce more details as we continue to address the issues raised in the survey.

Community supported boards

A key benefit of the custom board concept is that it enables a new category of board support: community support. This allows Mbed developers to add support for their own target and we’d like to take a moment to thank George Beckstein, Zoltan Hudak and Andreas Terstegge for taking a lead and adding support for the first of, we hope, many new custom boards. Thank you.

Bare Metal Profile

As IoT scales, it must enable a broad range of device types, from feature rich to ultra-constrained. Mbed OS 6 enhances the Bare Metal Profile we released last year, delivering the features you need for devices with constrained memory footprints down to 8k of RAM and 32k of Flash, through API consistency between releases and RTOS and non-RTOS environments. It also provides Mbed OS 2 users with a straightforward upgrade path to the latest code base, allowing you to take full advantage of new features and performance improvements as we release them.

Cloud services support

We think it is important that Mbed OS meet the needs of IoT developers by being cloud agnostic. Today we are pleased to release the first of a series of example integrations with different cloud services, which shows how you can connect to Amazon Web Services (AWS) via their SDK. We will be releasing more example integrations over the coming months, including Microsoft Azure and Google IoT Cloud. Alongside this, we continue to support Arm Pelion Device Management, and twenty of the development boards that support Mbed OS 6 can already work with Pelion Device Management.

As IoT developers continue to drive innovation with novel and interesting uses of IoT technology, we are keen to showcase the Mbed users who are at the forefront of this technological advance. Over the coming weeks we will highlight some examples of new ideas and products using Mbed that we hope will interest and inspire others and truly show the capabilities Mbed OS 6 offers.

Mbed OS 6 is available now using Mbed Studio and the Mbed Online Compiler, or directly on the Mbed GitHub repository. We hope you like it and we look forward to seeing the new and interesting products that it helps you create.

Links:

• Mbed OS 6 documentation
• Mbed OS 6 source code on GitHub