The first samples of the mbed Application Board are back from the manufacturers, L-TEK. There are a few minor tweeks to make before we press the "GO" button for full production, but the tests so far have worked great.

The three lucky winners who will get one of these application boards in exchange for writing a driver and associated cookbook page are, in no particular order :

• Erik Olieman - MMA7660 3-axis +/1 1.5g Accelerometer
• Peter Drescher - C12832 Graphics LCD Screen
• Matthew Shoemaker - LM75B I2C Temperature sensor

A big thanks to all the people who applied - Keep your eyes out, we may well do another competition for "the most interesting application"!

Over the coming weeks, libraries, "hello world" examples, cookbook pages and so on will start to appear for the application board, along with the schematics and all of the support materials you'd expect. I'm aiming for it to be available in time for the Christmas rush ;-). I will be working with all your favourite distributors to get it on the shelves and arrange pre-ordering.

In the mean time, a few people asked about the Xbee socket. This has been designed to accept the popular Xbee Zigbee module or the RN-XV wifly module. We've also made sure that the USB Host socket can be powered externally so that a Vodafone USB Modem can be used. That's a whole lot of wireless communication!

Keep your eyes out for the announcement when they become available, and in the mean time, check out the fully loaded board, complete with Wifi!

For those interested interested in the the minor tweek to be made...

There was a slight error in the footprint for the MMA7660 accelerometer. Some of the copper pads were in the wrong order - very frustrating for a board that was otherwise electrically perfect (Arrrgh!!). If you want to see how I proved the fix, here is a photo from down the barrel of our microscope. That's enamel coated wires from the PCB pads, onto the pads of the devices' DFN-10 3mmx3mm package. I like the occasional challenge!