Hi guys,

I am completely new to mBed and ARM programming.I have pledged for a kick-starter the mBuino... So small I couldn't resist getting one. I want to learn how to program it using the on-line compiler. It won't get to me till late August but want to start learning now.

What do you guys suggest, sites\tutorials\ebooks etc... that will assist me once I get my hands on the mBuino?

I have some experience programming C#, Python, PHP etc..

I'm thinking of a few small projects to get my son interested in this as well.

Here are the specs....

NXP LPC11U24 ARM® Cortex™-M0 50Mhz 32K FLASH / 10K RAM SPI I2C UART USB Programmed with mbed's online compiler IDE, and any other ARM Cortex-compatible IDE.

Mbed uses C++ (You can also program them in C, but then you can't use the mbed lib since that is written in C++), so in principle you can if you want start practising with any C++ tutorial for some general information. The main differences are the mbed lib to handle peripherals (such as flashing or fading an LED, you obviously don't have that when you are just running it on your local computer) and that the LPC11u24 isn't the largest microcontroller, and what is very small for a PC, can be large for a microcontroller. For example printf is fine to use, but cout takes alot of resources.

For the mbed library probably a good place to start is: http://mbed.org/handbook/Homepage. You can skip some stuff, such as how to manually compile the libraries, and go directly to the libraries. One other thing to notice: SerialPC, which uses USBTX and USBRX won't work on your device. That goes normally via a seperate interface IC, and the mbuino doesn't have that (similar to a few others, since the 11u24 doesn't need that IC for programming),

@Sten

please provide a feedback once you start (after a while of using mbed). I would like to hear from you more about how easy/difficult is to start with mbed. If there's anything we can improve!

EnjoY mbed.

Regards, 0xc0170

Thanks for the replies.

@Martin I certainly will give feedback.

Hi Martin. I started using mbed last Saturday. In general I find it easy to start with, but there is lots of information to absorb and that can be a bit overwhelming at start. However, the integrated community makes it easy to ask for help and promotes the sharing of code, which enables everyone to get quick results. After my first acquaintance I produced my first project: a dice program for mBuino. Publishing was quite easy too, I only missed some handy help bulbs here and there as not all fields were entirely clear to me. For instance: a short line about the difference between Berkely and Apache licence would be helpful. In the process I may have forked the code unneeded, but the end-result seems okay. Last notes: I was unable to upload a jpg to my profile-photo and saving an edited question answer also failed.

Hi,

I have passed the beginner phase but just passed.... I found very useful to get feedback via serial. Because I am thick and end up making many mistakes here and there and had trouble debugging, I end up making a small library that allows you to check and change your variables in run-time.

I used it a lot with neopixels changing colors as well with analog-out and pwm.

Essentially via a couple of commands you read/set variables in your running program without any messing in your code. better than printf !!! as you can red any variable at any point of execution.

Hope it helps.

JC

and yes.. the library is called VarStore.... which you should be able to import from the online compile repository...