Within 12 minutes I have a SD card wired in and writing files!

Hi Everone,

Well, my goal is to learn the C computer language and in doing so give something back to all the guys at http://www.ecuproject.com for all the help they have given me in making my car a better car!

My project is to use MBED as a USB to CPU32 BDM interface and CAN Bus interface (selectable by different 'modes'). The idea is to use this gizmo to FLASH update the Trionic ECUs in Saab cars.

I got into this quite by accident when my air-con failed on my car and I was researching what it could be since my mechanic couldn't fix it. In my research I stumbled upon http://www.ecuproject.com/ and with a lot of help from the guys there made my car much better almost for nothing (apart from my insurance premiums !). Anyway, along the way I also started finding out about CPU32 BDM and made some improvements (although not all of them work properly, work is still in progress) using AS32 assembly language. Until last year I had never even thought about how these things work, let alone get involved. What surprises me most is that there is always more than one way to do something with computers. Oh and if anyone can explain to me how computers can do more than one thing at once that would be good, everything I have done so far just does one thing at a time lol, perhaps PCs are different from car ECUs though.

My day job is quite different, I work in marketing and promotions organising trade show exhibitions and occasionally getting involved with dreaming up ideas for advertising campaigns.

Sophie x

PS in case you're wondering my mechanic was able to fix my air-con too, it was a 'metal bottle' that was full or blocked ?!? Quite unusual apparently.

Hi and welcome!

Sophie Dexter wrote:
Oh and if anyone can explain to me how computers can do more than one thing at once that would be good,

It is the same with all computers... the processor does only one thing at a time, even in a PC (except of course the new multi-core processors). Now imagine that this one thing that processor does is a list of other things to do. The "main" program goes through the list, figures out what to do next, then jumps to doing it, only it does each thing in a very little increment, then it gets interrupted to go back to the list and figure out next thing to do. While it is doing all of the "tasks" very fast - it looks like they all perform in parallel. Usually OS takes care of this, since it can be very involved. On embedded system you usually face a bare hardware. So you can choose to use an OS (RTOS) of some sort, or craft your own task switcher. Or just do only one thing. Hope that short intro explains it.

Hi everyone, my name is Pablo and i'm from Spain.My english isn't very good but i'll try do it better in order to share with you my projects. I am migrating from Arduino and i hope learn so much with Mbed microcontroller.

Outl4w

Greetings from Finland!

I'm Tommi (or Tommy if you like it better) and I just had to buy a big mouth Billy Bass after seeing videos of it after some modification. At first I was going to make something like the older examples found on the web for modding Billy, but discovering the mbed (through watching mbedded Billy), I just had to buy an mbed too.

The plan is to make Billy the voice of the house, babbling out home automation data, weather forecasts, news and other stuff. My plan is to get Billy speak dynamically generated content, not prerecorded stuff as most examples I've seen do.

This is quite a big task as I'm new to C (I do mostly Java) and I'm very noob on electronics (hardware) also. I've played with AVRs and assembly (AVR studio) before, and after some first tests the mbed seems way easier to work with.

I will be a frequent poster on the questions forum :)

Tommi Laurila wrote:

Greetings from Finland!

I'm Tommi (or Tommy if you like it better) and I just had to buy a big mouth Billy Bass after seeing videos of it after some modification. At first I was going to make something like the older examples found on the web for modding Billy, but discovering the mbed (through watching mbedded Billy), I just had to buy an mbed too.

The plan is to make Billy the voice of the house, babbling out home automation data, weather forecasts, news and other stuff. My plan is to get Billy speak dynamically generated content, not prerecorded stuff as most examples I've seen do.

This is quite a big task as I'm new to C (I do mostly Java) and I'm very noob on electronics (hardware) also. I've played with AVRs and assembly (AVR studio) before, and after some first tests the mbed seems way easier to work with.

I will be a frequent poster on the questions forum :)

This project may not be as trivial as you think. Igor has built some great examples for requesting information via the ethernet port.

You may also want to check out: http://www.speechchips.com/shop/

These are text to speech chips that can save you tons of time coding, if you have the text, these chips use mathematical algorithms to create a real speech synthesizer

Hi All

I originally studied Computer Engineering (the uni's training microcontroller of choice was the 68HC11) but have been working in finance.  I am taking a 12 months break to travel / consider career options.   During this time I will return to dabbling in embedded electronics, initially as a hobby.  My first two projects will be 1. an automated hydroponic system (initally for growing kitchen herbs but ideally building out to vegetables etc.) and 2. an automated brewing system (for beer and cider).

Both projects will have similar requirements ie: measuring temperature / ph / other similar variables and controlling pumps / heating elements / valves.  I hope to have these systems operating wirelessly so will also investigate the use of xbee or similar.

The mbed looked to be the most painless way to rapidly get a test system up and running but I will also be investigating building things from scratch using other microprocessors.

Evan

Hi all

I am an electronics hobbyist who wants to get started in using microcontrollers and learning `C`. I stumbled across mbed on the Hackaday website and decided to buy one last week, I am really impressed with mbed so far in terms of getting a couple of the example projects going straight away, quite an accomplishment for me! I am also impressed with the mbed community and the support and enthusiasm shared between members on the forum. I am really encouraged by this attitude especially as I may ask some "obvious" questions, so please be patient with me.

I have tried a few projects in the past using the Microchip PIC devices but found it all a bit confusing and eventually gave up. However the mbed has so many more features and it seems more intuitive to me, so here goes...........

Paul (UK).

Hello all,

I was introduced to microconrollers like many others via the Arduino platform. I love it to death, but as the years have gone by and my projects have become more ambitious, I have been stuck by a few of it's limitations. I plan on using the embed as the core of my current project, a high altitude balloon. It will be interfaced with a Telit GM862-gps. I'm currently pleading with the folks at Telit to remove the altitude restrictions in the firmware of their GPS units (~24Km), but haven't had much luck yet. Anyway, I look forward to looking at other peoples projects and a big thank you to the mbed team for a fine tool.

Best,

Erik

Chicago IL US

Hello,

First I apologise for the bad english, as french and not very skilled for "exotic" (from my point of view) languages ;-)

second I just got my mbed and the main purpose will be an coder for a modelist radio control.

I plan to use I2C adc/eeprom/20*4 lcd display/io expander and spécialised 2.4Ghz Tx module.

The main fonctions are already defined just need the how to

I would like to know if there is un detailled manual of all the function of the mbed, for exemple I discover the usb file system but I can't find the spec ou this space (size, where it is stocked, is it part of the flash memory of the controleur, is it possible to expand it with an SD card or an i2c eeprom....)

in the same time I have to learn the C language (an another exotic one ;-)  my only expérience with controller is pic basic !

but no pain, no gain !

JF Pion

Hi All,

I'm an electronics/computing technician in a university in N.Ireland. Up until now I've been using AVR micros and Codevision which I like very much. I'd been wary of ARM processors because of the learning curve in using them and possibly very expensive development tools, so I ignored ARM chips until I needed the extra processing power in a recent project. Once I started researching the ARM family I was excited and surprised by the amount of reasonably priced development hardware available and I thought the MBED was an amazing piece of kit for the price. I've been doing some programming using the Elektor Armee board. Setting up the compiler software using GCC was a bit daunting and I'm sure I still don't understand completely how GCC works but I've managed to make some progress using it. The lpc2368 has more uarts which i need for a project interfacing a note validator which is why I have moved up from the lpc2106. I'm looking forward to using the MBED and from learning from some of the interesting projects already published.

When I get the time I plan to learn using USB and ethernet comms to play music from external devices. I have some experience using the VS1011 chip and using I2C so I plan on doing some further experiments using the MBED.

Regards.

Willie (N.Ireland)

HI,

Im predominatnly a Parallax Propeller user but have been looking to couple this powerful micro with something else for expansion capabilities.

Whilst the Propeller excels in many areas like video generation there are others where it is severely lacking and I think a marriage of Propeller and mbed would make a great platform.

I too have been put off by the plethora or ARM devices, development boards and toolchains, it's difficult to know where to start. Now that I have an mbed I know exactly where to start ;)

Our main interest is in retro gaming so here is an example of our work.....

Regards,

Coley

Hello mbed World!

I'm Daniel (a.k.a. GuerrillaCoder). My day job is as a Reliability engineer working with organic TFT's in active matrix backplanes. We use them to drive bistable display media (like EInk) and PDLC. So as you can guess I love anything to do with displays! :)

My degree is in Physics and, despite my current job, I'm not so great with hardware. My skill set is mostly in managed code programming with .net and C++, so I am hoping mbed will give me some exposure of the world of hardware.

My project plans are to start building up a nice library of components that I can interchange in many projects. Everything I am buying will be on breakout boards for easy prototyping. I am starting with RJ45, SD card and LCD display.

Once I am confident with these components, I want to start playing with social networking API's (Twitter, Facebook, SecondLife...etc) and work on creating real world hardware which can be interacted with in the virtual world (and visa-versa)

First idea would be a large RGB LED matrix + a webcam connected to twitter, controlled by an mbed. People can create art by sending a matrix of colour codes, the mbed will drive the LED matrix and post a picture of their art on twitpic/flickr or whatever. I know this has been done before but I would like to do it myself from the ground up.

From then the skies the limit.

Looking forward to asking lots of questions and learning alot :0

GuerrillaCoder

My second mbed arrived in the mail today. I don't know what I'm going to do with it yet, but I'm looking forward to the holidays when I'll have the opportunity to play with two of your gems

Hi All,

I'm Chris(a.k.a. gizmo) and I currently work as an AV/IT technician at a University in the North West of England. My history with microprocessors and microcontrollers goes back to 1976 when I wrote my first program - punched cards & green lined fan-fold paper etc. Over the years I've worked with many varieties of microcontroller especially the PIC family but recently I'd been looking for something a bit more powerful for a control application here at the University. Whilst trawling through the web I stumbled on the Mbed system and thought it would be ideal for developing my new design and the on-line compiler/library will enable me to 'get-to-know' the ARM architecture quickly. Ultimately I plan to use the Quantum Leaps Framework ( www.state-machine.com ) as the basis for my future control systems, the problem at the moment is my 30+ years of traditional coding versus the object based state machines, a bit more study and I should grasp it!!!

Electronics and embedded code development are a passion as well as a job but my other main interest (apart from my wife & 2 children) is motorbikes - now motorbikes + mbed...........I wonder.

Regards,

Chris 

Hey,

I'm Josh. I'm 29 and a EE by school and trade. I do product support for a few Atlas V components. Started tinker with an arduino a year ago as my first foray into microcontrollers and bought an mbed recently. No more experience than that.

Right now I'm working on building an IMU. I currently have an accelerometer, gyro, compass, and pressure sensor. I nearly have the mbed talking to all of these components. Now it's down to integration which means sensor fusion and orientation tracking. I've been studying kalman and quaternions for a bit now, so I'm going to try my own version. Why my own version? All about the journey... yadda, yadda. Basically, my studying of standard kalman theory ended in my annoyance. K factors mask a simple weighted average and linear algebra produces code/math that is hard to understand the underlying concepts. *steps off soap box*. So I guess I can't really call what I'm doing Kalman.

Once I get dead reckoning to where I want it, I'll work on integrating things like the xbee, aircraft (quad or beginner's plane), and gps. Maybe I'll even try some optical flow sensor experiements.

This thread was a really good idea, but it seems to have gone a bit quiet. I hope we can get it going again! So here's my background.

I suspect I'm one of the oldest mbedders. I wrote my first program in 1958 at the age of 11. I'm now more or less retired, but spend most of my working life in the software development world.

I'm interested in robotics, and have played with microcontrollers on and off since the late 1990s. I started on PICs, moved to Atmel AVRs and recently got given a half share in an Arduino.

I take part in the road test scheme run by Farnell/Element14, and was one of the people lucky enough to be selected to review the mbed. As you can see I am now an mbed convert!

I'm currently working on various bits of test gear based in the I2C and SPI busses, and doing a bit of robotics as well.

Hi mbedders,

I'm 20, still on an undergrad General Engineering course at uni, but recently did a coursework module which went along the lines of "here are a few mbed chips and other components, make something cool"! As such, we made very basic 'laser tag' style guns with tv remote infrared receivers, and IR LEDs. Pretty fun to play around with, each gun sent its own code, and we ran out of time to get wifi to update another chip about who's been hitting who.

Hooked on the simple compiler, I've now got a fairly large plan (considering I haven't done too much programming) of making a simple drum machine!

I've got analog circuits that create 8 different sounds from a 3.3V 4ms pulse (how convenient!) so I've drawn up all my plans from that. It includes - tempo control, note duration ratio (for swung beats), 3time or 4time, tempo double switch, a selection of drum fills, and a nice output display onto a 20X4 LCD.

Sounds will be Kick, Snare, HHopen, HHclosed, hi tom, low tom, clap, and wood block.

I'll keep you updated on the site somewhere, you might see it kicking around by the end of summer ;)

Here's what I've got for now:

(yes I know I shouldn't write such a big chunk of code without testing, but I can't get to the chip right now!)

George

Hello mbed world,

I plan to use this as a method of re-teaching my hands and brain to work again as I have recently undergone several neck spine surgeries- I have permanent spinal damage. In my previous life I have worked on inertial nav systems, lasers, imaging and computer systems to name but a few over a 27 year career.

Hi Larry, you have come to the right place.

The Mbed platform is by far the best option to start with embedded processors. You do not have to have any knowledge of compiling, it works straight out of the box. Depending on where you want to go and budget, you have a choice of two manufacture processor boards, the MBed LPC1768 and the Freescale KL25Z.

There is the LPC11U24, I have one of these but do not use it very much, I prefer the LPC1768 and KL25Z.

The LPC1768 will give you more flexibility with Ethernet included and runs at 96Mhz but is a bit juicy on power (around 150mA at normal operation power), the FRDM-KL25Z is very cost effective, lower power (around 15mA) but with a slower processor (48Mhz) and does not include Ethernet however it does have other toys on it but not much else and would require other peripherals in particular LCD displays.

Comparing processor speeds, in most cases this is not an issue, much of the code I have for the LPC1768 will perform just as well on the KL25Z unless you want to fit code operation between timed interrupts.

Mbed has an application board for the LPC1768 and LPC11U24 with many 'bits' including LCD display and Ethernet connectors to get you going straight away:

http://mbed.org/cookbook/mbed-application-board

I would recommend this in you current situation as it will not require any 'construction' to get going just plug and play and will keep you busy for quite a while. You can easily expand this board by adding components using a bread board and a few jumper wires.

I hope it works out well for you.

All the best

Paul

Should have posted first hahaha my FRDM-KL25Z should be here in a few days- thanks for the info :)

Hi Larry

No problem with this board, here is some code I have published on Mbed:

http://mbed.org/users/star297/code/KL25Z_DCF77_HY-1_8LCD/

You can get the display here:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1-8-Serial-SPI-TFT-LCD-Module-Display-PCB-Adapter-Power-IC-SD-Socket-128X160-/200917828584?pt=AU_B_I_Electrical_Test_Equipment&hash=item2ec7a2c3e8

Easy modify this program to display something else.

Paul, Thanks a million- rec'd about all my parts to start playing- will order this asap looks nice-

Hay Simon,

i need help of using the mbed first. and i have know about the purpose of the mbed assembly ,screaming circuits

The mbed is an amazing world for limited connectivity

Hay

Hay,it's a great world,we'll see the IoT come really true;Thank you mbed;