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11 years, 7 months ago.
Nice to meet you and a simple question ;-)
Hello, I,m from Spain and I just registered in this web because I think Mbed could be interesting for me.
I usually make a little projects with avr 8bits, my question is....
When I've finished the prototype and have to make the definitive pcb,etc, could I use the arm chip without the complet plataform? And, How I could program this arm micro? I,m interested in St o Nxp.
Thanks in advance.
1 Answer
11 years, 7 months ago.
First of all, the mbed platform uses everything around it only for programming, USB<>Serial conversion, etc. But the microcontrollers themselves and the code running on it is not dependent on anything else (well minus stuff like crystal, etc. Although that can also be changed in the startup code if you want). There is no bootloader ala Arduino. So if you put your code on a microcontroller on your custom PCB it should work perfectly fine.
How to program it depends on the microcontroller. NXP offers besides standalone programmers, also ISP programming (via UART0, so you just need a serial<>USB converter, which can be done by another mbed device) and the LPC11uXXs also have an integrated USB bootloader in the microcontroller itself.
Then on some boards you can also disconnect the microcontroller with an added jumper setting, and then use this one to program your custom one, for example: https://mbed.org/cookbook/Prototype-To-Hardware-KL25Z.
I don't know how the ST ones are programmed and what the options there are. I believe the programming/debugging part can actually be broken away from the rest of the board, and I guess you could then connect it to your own PCB, but I don't have them, so can't verify that.