In this page, we will outline the various ways your company or organisation can begin to contribute to and engage with the mbed community.

Say hello!¶

A good place to start is by registering your interest in partnership by emailing support@mbed.org.

The practical steps you can take to begin engaging with mbed developers are as follows:

Create an official account¶

You may like to have an “Official” account, with the username using the name of your product or company. Doing this allows mbed users to know that the software published under the account is official and that you are supporting it. It also has the advantage that your library won’t be published under the account of an employee or contractor who may not continue working on the project in the future.

It is a simple process to give other users, such as employees or contractors, access to your repositories on mbed so that they can contribute to the code from their own accounts.

Write a library for your hardware component or service¶

Adding your library to mbed will allow users to quickly integrate your product into their product. It also provides a place where users can ask questions about your product or post any issues they have with your library.

The API of a library can be documented using doxygen syntax, this will be displayed on the library’s page on the website and is also visible with mbed’s online IDE, this makes developing with your library even easier for the mbed community. See Writing a library

Write a hello world example for your product¶

A hello world is a concise program showing how a library is used; it should be easy to read and contain comments where appropriate. It doesn’t need to demonstrate every feature of a library but should give the reader a feel for how it works.

Add your products to the components database¶

The Components database is a place where the hardware and software components that make up an mbed based project can live. You should consider adding a component for your product. Currently components are maintained by the community but in the future we will allow partners to own their components so they can maintain them themselves.

A good component page should contain a picture, a hello world and a library to allow mbed users to quickly see what they’re looking at, have an overview of how it is used and see the library that will allow them to integrate it into their project.

Get some badges¶

Mbed users can have “badges” that identify them as members of an organization. All mbed staff have an mbed badge for example. If you want your users to have a badge that is visible when they post on mbed and on their user profile page please send an image and a list of users to support@mbed.org .

Answer (and ask) questions¶

The components page has a questions area specific to it, as do the pages for published library or program repositories. Questions can be marked as having an accepted answer by the user that posted the question. Over time this can produce a searchable knowledge base about your components and repositories that users can use as a reference in the future.