@andy: Thanks ever so much for your (very swift) reply -- just what I needed!
For others and for the sake of reference, to enable CTS for UART1 (which is wired to pins 13,14 on the mbed) you must first set the function of pin 12 to be CTS1 (rather than GPIO or SPI etc.) which can be done by setting bits 3:2 of PINSEL1 to 01:
LPC_PINCON->PINSEL1 = ((LPC_PINCON->PINSEL1) & ~(3<<2)) | 1<<2;
(See: LPC1768 User Manual, Table 80, Bottom of Page 108)
Next enable automatic-CTS on UART1. This is set in the MCR (modem control register), bit 7:
LPC_UART1->MCR |= 1<<7;
(See: LPC1768 User Manual, Table 299, Top of Page 327)
The port can now be used as-per-usual but it will now take into account a CTS signal on pin 12, i.e. it will not transmit while pin 12 is high.
Hello, according to the LCP1768 datasheet I found here:
www.nxp.com/documents/data_sheet/LPC1769_68_67_66_65_64_63.pdf
UART1 supports hardware handshaking, i.e. pausing transmission while a particular input line is high. As far as I can tell the supplied API doesn't support this (as stated by a few people on the forum). Is UART1 one of the exposed UARTs and if so where should I be looking for documentation on how to use the UARTs natively (I'm fairly new to microcontroller development and I don't really know where to look).
Many thanks for your help.