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10 years, 3 months ago.
How does mbed work?
Hi. I've just heard about mbed! and after couple of hours searching I couldn't find my answer. I was wondering how exactly does mbed work? I mean for example I have exported a simple program (HelloWorld) as uVision project and It really works inside uVision and uVision can compile it without a problem or even more complicated samples like TCP/IP and so on ... but all I can see in the projects are some header files. Aren't you supposed to have some implementation C/C++ source files? A file that works with low level registers and things like that. Or does it use CMSIS? If it does, how exactly? I guess I'm missing something but I'm not sure what it is!
1 Answer
10 years, 3 months ago.
Hey, when you export from the mbed compiler you get the mbed library as a binary, the headers are just the interface, will have the extension .ar meaning its an archive of object files.
The source for the mbed library is available on github.
Thank you. I saw mbed.ar before in project files but just didn't realize it's what I'm looking for! Now one more thing. What does mbed have to do with CMSIS? cause I've seen CMSIS mentioned in this site very much. Even in github it was some directories named CMSIS.
Can we say mbed in a way is kind of a competitor to CMSIS ?
posted by 18 Sep 2014CMSIS is an interface provided by arm for their cortex microcontrollers, mbed is an abstraction layer to simplify embedded programming and uses CMSIS in places. (as far as I'm aware)
posted by 18 Sep 2014Just one more thing. I just ran HelloWorld example in http://mbed.org/platforms/mbed-LPC1768/ on my custom LPC1768 board but I got nothing. I was wondering how does this project handles necessary start-up things like initializing PLL and so on. Since I remember from old time that we had to have a *.s assembly start-up file in our project in Keil. But I dont see that in this project. Do you think that must be the reason why I'm not getting result? If so then what should I do and if no then what do you think is wrong?
posted by 18 Sep 2014I'm afraid I cant help you there, may be best to open another question. although http://mbed.org/users/chris/notebook/prototype-to-hardware/ may be of some use
posted by 18 Sep 2014Thank you. Say where can I get the whole mbed sources as a single .zip file? I really don't know much about github. Is there a option or something like that in github where I can do that?
That's because I dont want to use mbed.ar file. I would much rather to use sources directly in my project.
posted by 18 Sep 2014Should be a button on the right of the screen to download a zip, https://github.com/mbedmicro/mbed
posted by 18 Sep 2014You can also get te mbed-src from the mbed site: http://mbed.org/users/mbed_official/code/mbed-src/, which you can use in the online compiler, but you can also make a HelloWorld program with it and export it to your toolchain: http://mbed.org/teams/mbed/code/mbed-src-program/. If you export it, only the relevant files for your target should be included, and I would advice you to first import it in the online compiler, update mbed-src, and then export it. Otherwise you got an outdated version.
posted by 18 Sep 2014