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10 years, 5 months ago.
Flash Memory & IC1
I'm new to this product, and haven't received my LPC1768 yet, but I have a question or two. I note on the schematics that there is a 2meg serial flash memory on the board. Is that accessible by the program on the LPC1768 as a "hard drive" to store and retrieve configuration data, etc? If not, can I use the internal flash for this function?
Second question: What exactly is IC1 (marked MBED-IF1) and how is it used in the overall design? I can see how it is connected but exactly how it functions isn't made clear in the stuff I've read so far.
I apologize if these questions have already been answered - perhaps someone could point me to those answers.
Chuck
1 Answer
10 years, 5 months ago.
MBED-IF1 is the interface IC. It provides serial <> USB bridge, it can be loaded with firmware for 'real' debugging, it provides the drag and drop programming, and localfilesystem. These last two are placed on the flash memory.
http://mbed.org/handbook/LocalFileSystem -> you can indeed use that to store for example configuration data. Since the memory is shared between the microcontroller and a USB mass storage device used also for programming, any files on your localfilesystem appear also on the mbed when you plug it in your computer.
Thanks for the quick answer! I was going to try using an Arduino Due for my project, but I'm liking this module and development environment even better! It appears to be well thought-out and robust.
posted by 26 Oct 2013I might be biased, but especially for 32-bit applications I consider mbed way superior compared to Arduino. Largely because mbed was made specifically for 32-bit microcontrollers, while Arduino is for 8-bits, and they also ported it to a 32-bit board (the Due). But already the Timing libraries are so handy to have, and for those you simply need 32-bit timers.
posted by 26 Oct 2013