ARM, NXP Launch Prototyping Tools for 32-bit MCU
The aim is to open up lots of new market opportunities beyond talking fish
Karen Field, Editor-in-Chief -- Design News, September 25, 2009
Boston, MA — At the Embedded Systems Show (ESC) this week, ARM and NXP announced the launch of mbed.org and the mbed microcontroller rapid prototyping tools, which they say will enable new users to get started in just 60 seconds.
Sixty seconds sounds like typical marketing hype. But product Manager Simon Ford says the concept behind mbed, the industry's first online platform for rapid prototyping of 32-bit microcontrollers, will help design engineers be more innovative and productive. And come up the learning curve more quickly. In short, they hope to get the tools into the hands of lots of design engineers who will find all sorts of new applications for the technology.
The $99 mbed microcontroller (currently on special for $60) packages an NXP LPC1768 Cortex-M3 processor-based MCU and support components in a 40-pin 0.1 inch pitch DIP form factor for easy breadboarding. The mbed Compiler allows users to write programs in C++ and download them to run on the microcontroller, while the mbed library gives engineers an API-driven approach to coding.
To illustrate a clever, though silly, use of the mbed microcontroller, Ford had on display "Twittering Billy Hack," you know, that obnoxious talking fish that was so popular a few years back. Engineers replaced Billy's brain with an mbed microcontroller connected some of the PWM pins to Billy's motors, added an SD card to store audio files, and connected the mbed's Ethernet interface to the internet.
Here's how it works: The mbed polls a Web page to check for Tweets, then requests the Web server to translate it to a voice and return it as an audio file when Billy requests it. It also generates a move file on an SD card. Once Billy has audio and move comments on the SD cards, he plays them out the mbed analog output to speakers.
"Just ignore the talking fish," Billy wisecracked as I departed from the meeting with Ford.
Click here for more information, to get an mbed, or find out more about Twittering Billy Bass and other projects using mbed tools.
