Ruel Oquindo

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5 years, 2 months ago.

Is mbed OS 2 still alive?

Microcontroller boards using only mbed OS 2 are still being sold, so i'm assuming mbed OS 2 is still supported but I'm having trouble

Doing $ mbed new blinky mbedlib does not work... hangs at the same spot and doesn't seem to complete.

I tried again this morning, and its even worse... didn't download a single file. [mbed] Downloading library build "65be27845400" (might take a while) but nothing ever happens.

Also tried mbed add http://os.mbed.com/users/mbed_official/code/mbed/ and also does not work... just waits forever

So what's the story with mbed OS 2? Abandoned?

3 Answers

Paul Staron
5 years, 2 months ago.

It's working for me, I have just tried this:

https://os.mbed.com/users/mbed_official/code/mbed_blinky/

working on LPC1768

Thanks Paul.

The online compiler works, but from the command line doing

mbed new blinky mbedlib

does not work. It doesn't seem to finish setting up and the command line prompt isnt returned back to me. It just hangs. (mbed 5 works though)

My processor is F031K6

posted by Ruel Oquindo 13 Oct 2019
Johannes Stratmann
5 years, 2 months ago.

it looks like mbed2 is too large. In https://os.mbed.com/users/mbed_official/code/mbed-dev/ the zipfile is not including the sources like before, the gz contains sources and a build dir with incredible 4GB of precompiled code. The sources can be used and you can copy the .temp with the tools from another project, this looks like the only way to use mbed2 now offline. At least the option create-only should download the actual tools (or another option to do this). mbed2 is still interesting for smaller targets.

Zoltan Hudak
5 years, 2 months ago.

Hello Ruel,

It depends what you mean by alive. One can still create new Mbed OS 2 projects applying some "tricks" as explained by Johannes. But it's impossible to import the Mbed 2 library using Mbed CLI. Mbed team knows about this problem since December 2018 (https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbed-cli/issues/805) but no action has been taken so far. Also there is no development ongoing for Mbed OS 2. So from this point of view it does not seem to be alive. It looks like Mbed OS 2 has been abandoned in favor of the Mbed OS 5 Bare metal profile (Mbed OS 5 without RTOS) which is similar to Mbed OS 2 and suitable for MCUs equipped with less RAM and Flash. That was a reasonable decision from Mbed because only one library has to be maintained. However, fixing the last revision of Mbed OS 2 would be a nice goodbye.

To use the Mbed OS 5 Bare metal profile , add a mbed_app.json configuration file to your Mbed OS 5 project:

med_app.json

{
    "requires": ["bare-metal"]
}

thanks Zoltan, great, something that I didn't recognized because I stopped to follow for about one year. I will try the bare-metal later also. Mbed5 introduced also a lot of code and runtime cost for locks and checking them. I had compared older Mbed2 releases, even there some older versions might solve space and runtime problems. This was for a LPC812 with only 16 kB flash, but I've upgraded this project already to a LPC824 with 32 kB flash.

posted by Johannes Stratmann 17 Oct 2019

But it's impossible to import the Mbed 2 library using Mbed CLI. Mbed team knows about this problem since December 2018 (https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbed-cli/issues/805) but no action has been taken so far

Ahhh... Thanks Zoltan. I didn't know about this. I usually use mbed5 with my F4 board, but since playing with this smaller STM32F0 board, I encountered the mbed2 cli problem.

I just took this problem as a springboard to learning HAL framework using CubeMX. at least making something good out of this.

However, fixing the last revision of Mbed OS 2 would be a nice goodbye.

I agree.

Thanks again.

posted by Ruel Oquindo 17 Oct 2019