5 years, 1 month ago.

Mbed or Arduino?

I'm pro Mbed and have been since 2010.

I did drop out for a couple of years due to other commitments, now back and lots of changes. I was exporting my work to Simplicity Studio to use the Energy Profiler, now that exporter has been removed. I like the look of OS5 but can not get any of my code working on it, but that's not a problem I prefer Mbed 2 in any case as I like to hard code as much as possible although understandably it has been pushed aside for a bit whilst OS5 comes up to speed.

Yesterday I was locked out of the online compiler for almost the whole day, however it has been very reliable for some time now.

I've recently seen someone using this;

https://programino.com/

I've never liked the Arduino, looks a bit like the 70's style DOS command line screen and had very little MCU choice.

Looks like that has all changed a reasonable looking GUI and now loads of target MCU's including STM32's

What are others using in the way of offline IDE's with Mbed, I understand that for most of these the Compiler used is GCC GNU which I understand is the same as Arduino. Why would anyone want to use GCC GNU over Mbed's Keil?

So what now is the advantage of Mbed over Arduino and visa versa?

1 Answer

5 years, 1 month ago.

I can give my perspective. I have used Arduino only a little, but my impression is that it is probably easier to use for small one-off, hobby type projects. But as I understand it, because of the licensing, there is no good path to create an actual commercial product with Arduino. For people working in industry, that’s a non-starter. Also most of the Arduino micro’s are not very powerful.

I view mbed much more like traditional embedded product development. Benefits:

  • Large selection of powerful 32bit micro’s with devboards
  • Large selection of middleware libraries. Hopefully let’s you focus on your application.
  • Access to all the source code for when you inevitably need to tweak things
  • Works with proper desktop IDE’s and debuggers
  • Free to use is commercial product
  • No hardware overhead in production. Your $2 micro goes on the pcb per usual – no extra bits are required.
  • The fact that it is lead by ARM and that major micro vendors are participating is another good selling point

For me the online IDE is convenient for trying out new drivers, but I work offline day to day. I’m using ST’s System Workbench (it’s free). It’s been good. Unfortunately exporting an mbed project never works out of the box and I have to spend hours patching things up to get it to compile. I’ve had better luck exporting to Keil – I suspect ARM gives that IDE special attention. I’m looking forward to mbed studio which should hopefully give us a proper offline IDE without fighting export issues.

GCC compiler is free. The main benefit of the Keil compiler I see is that it produces smaller code. In the right situation this might let you save money on your micro. But Keil costs thousands of dollars per license. I work in a small team and we are using GCC. It’s not even so much the cost but we didn’t want to deal with the trouble of trying to juggle Keil licenses.

Accepted Answer

Thank you Graham, I'll look out for mbed studio.

posted by Paul Staron 25 Feb 2019