I am just starting into the mbed world (and the ARM world) and to be honest I am very impressed

one last question:
If I want to step from the free online- mbed Compiler here to a local IDE/Debugging solution
for example the "Code Red Suite 4 (NXP Edition)" or other
how can I "port" my C- application from here without having the mbed-library ?
(or the sourcecode of it)

you should look at http://mbed.org/users/AdamGreen/notebook/gcc4mbed/

Thanks Johannes, that's a very interesting project.

now I found this solution as well:
-> http://mbed.org/handbook/Exporting-to-offline-toolchains
especially for my question above (about code-red):
-> http://mbed.org/handbook/Exporting-to-Code-Red

what about the opposite way around ?
is it possible* to program the mbed NXP LPC1768 hardware
with the "pure" LPCXpresso IDE
-> http://www.code-red-tech.com/lpcxpresso.php
( or with the "pure" Red Suite 4 (NXP Edition)
-> http://www.code-red-tech.com/red-suite-4-nxp.php )

"pure" means without using the (exported) mbed-libraries from here ?
but using only the libraries that come from "code red" for the NXP LPC1768 ?

You can also use the Red Suite without the mbed libs. If you copy the binary to the mbed it will run. If you use the code red version of the libc (Redlib) your code will be smaller, but it does not support C++ at the moment.

If you want to program bare LPC1768 it will be better to use a LPCXpresso board, because you get a debugger. The LPC-Link debugger will work up to 128kb code in the free version.

that was the core of the question, thank you.
I wondered if there is some special chip on the mbed (or something like that), that let the bootloader work with binaries from the mbed-compiler only... ;-)
(cause one chip on the mbed is lasered (labelled) with the "mbed.org"-sign ...)

Hi Dirk,

The mbed Microcontroller boards are designed to load any raw binary ARM image, however it was created!

So you can generate that using the mbed Compiler/SDK, but also any other toolchain that targets the LPC1768; MDK, Code Red, GCC, or even your own code generator :)

Simon

very good !
thank you.

The chip with the mbed-sign has four things to do. First it act as a usb drive with 2Mb to the PC.

It is also connected to the JTAG port of the LPC1768 to flash the program into, to act as a serial port to the PC and make the 2Mb accessible from the mbed side.

There is a drawing from Simon somewere ...

Peter

Dirk, you might also want to check out this project on Google Code by ludo.visser. It appears that it provides a C based library (in source code format) to interface with the peripherals on the mbed that you could use from an offline compiler like Code Red. I haven't tried it out myself.