Hello everyone,
I would like to point out that this is my first review ever and all suggestions for the future would be welcome.
I was very surprised to even be selected for a road test as I have only been a member here for a very short time. So you can imagine how it felt to actually get a package from Farnell on Friday. I was just about to go to a folk music festival when I discovered it. I was so anxious to start playing with it that I took it with me. Well I got to test some examples with onboard leds and virtual serial port and everything was really simple but I just couldn't wait to get back home to start serious testing.
So today at work I plugged it into the breadboard for the first time and got it connected to some testing hardware.
The documentation is really easy to understand and seems to cover everything needed to get your system up and running but since everything is so easy and all the examples actually work as described you soon run out of things to do. For beginners it is very nice and really gives you confidence to dive into experimenting on your own. That is where it gets difficult. Although there are a lot of libraries for different things to interface there are some that should be there but for some reason were overlooked. For example standard SPI or I2C memory library would have been nice. This is not difficult to implement yourself and I think the reason it is missing might be because the platform is quite new. The updates on the page seem to be regular (judging from history) and each update brings new features.
In my oppinion the biggest problem right now is the USB interface. It works as a virtual serial port and also shows up as a flash disc but there seems to be very little information about how to program the mbed to register as a USB device. For example the hardware in this controller would be perfect for some USB HID testing but I couldn't get it to show up as one yet. Granted I have only spent a few hours actually using the device.
One nice thing for me is the fact that you can use your mbed as a bridge between a laptop and pretty much any piece of electronic hardware you can think of. There are examples for using the virtual com port to control pretty much any interface on the mbed. This means that I can use my laptop USB to control CAN, Ethernet, I2C, SPI and with analog IO plus plenty of DIO there are few things I can't experiment with.
One thing I noticed was that the controller gets pretty hot when driving all the onboard leds (there are five, all blue). Also the reset button is actually a simple tactile button not like they show on the pictures.
Right now I am using my mbed to test a few radio transceivers and it has really saved me a lot of time as I usually build my test devices with AVR controllers and they take considerably more effort to work as bridging devices.
More to follow as I continue to test this wonderful piece of modern engineering.
