mbed 2.0 SDK Released, becomes Open Source and Supports $12.95 Freescale Freedom Board

The mbed community has had a pretty busy week, with first the announcement that mbed SDK would become open source, the release of mbed 2.0, and finally support for the low cost Freescale Freedom board FRDM-KL25Zpowered by Kinetis Cortex M0+ KL25Z MCU. mbed becomes open source The mbed Software Development Kit (SDK), a C/C++ MCU software platform, has always been free (as in free beer) for both commercial and noncommercial use, and the large community around mbed has written tons of code for ARM microcontrollers. But now that the SDK has now a stable API, and the developers achieved transparent portability for code based on the SDK across multiple controllers and multiple toolchains, they decided to release the SDK source under an Apache 2.0 license. Although sharing modifications is encouraged, this license allows users to keep the changes closed if they wish to do so. mbed developers explain that the 3 […]

Adafruit mbed and NFC/RFID Starter Pack with µNFC stack & NFC Mood Lamp Demo

If you are looking for a (relatively) low cost NFC development kit, you may interested in Adafruit mbed and NFC/RFID Starter Pack that sells for 134.99 USD. The kit contains the following items: mbed LPC1768 (Cortex M3) development board with mini-B USB cable and reference cards NFC/RFID breakout board based on PN532 NFC transceiver MiFare RFID card with 1K programmable EEPROM Full-sized breadboard 40 x 3″ (75mm) long male/male jumper wires Standard blue & white 16×2 character LCD + contrast potentiometer + header Diffused 5mm RGB LED + 3 x 560 ohm resistors Analog temperature sensor (TMP36) Piezo buzzer 2 x 10K trim potentiometer 5 x Tactile Pushbuttons On the software side, you can use AppNearMe µNFC stack written in C++ that allows you to use a user interface on NFC-enabled smartphone, removing the need for knobs, buttons, screens on your embedded device. During the initial pairing, the NFC board can […]

Play Angry Birds For Real with Mbed NXP Cortex-M0 Slingshot

If you’re just bored to play Angry Birds with the touchscreen of your smartphone or with your mouse in Angry Birds for Chrome, you can now bring the fun back to the game by playing with a real slingshot ! mbed designed a USB slingshot with an mbed NXP LPC11U24 (Cortex-M0 MCU) board that emulates a USB mouse. mbed measures the angle and strength applied with: An accelerometer that measure the tilt by tracking the gravity vector A rubber stretch sensor used as the sling, and measure how much it is stretched. They built the slingshot with the following hardware components: mbed NXP LPC11U24 board – 59 USD 3-axis Accelerometer – ADXL345 Accelerometer connect via SPI  – 14.95 USD Stretch Sensor connected to pin 15 (analog input) – 9.95 USD USB B connector Handcrafted Slingshot Here’s how mbed describes their NXP board: The mbed NXP LPC11U24 MCU module is a […]

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