This review discusses the LPC Xpresso 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0 and Mbed board kit.
In an effort to avoid one of those, "this is what's in the box" type write-ups the author has declined to write this immediately and delay until the time was presented to do a proper job of it. (Hopefully this lives up to that)
The board itself is well laid out in a very nice form factor. All I/O pins are on the edge and there is a little thru-hole proto area on the opposite end from the USB. EA did a great job on this one.
Once you download the IDE things are fairly straightforward. It is built around Eclipse, so anyone who has worked with it or TI's CCS should feel comfortable. In fact it feels cleaner and less encumbering, more open and easy than CCS.
Getting a project up is quite simple with the Import Example option in the Quickstart Pan. Using the 1114examples you can select which peripherals you want code for - such as adc, autoisp, timers(blinky), external interrupts, gpio, i2c, pwm, rs485, systick, uart and watchdog timer - all or one.
After the example projects are started you may create a new C project and grab the functions you want from the peripheral code that was generated.
Another good thing that the board has is probe pads that allow easy pin state reading with a scope or dmm - even though they are completely unnecessary the board maker has included them for convenient access. This is just another feature of a very well thought out and executed package.
Using this board has made me consider NXP and ARMs. While looking at NXP.com for a datasheet on this MCU I came across a new chip in this family, the LPC1102, that is 5mm square, 16-pin BGA, runs at 50MHz and is said to be very low-power - 10mA or 130uA/MHz (fuzzy math?). Already I am thinking about where to use it. From what I have seen there is plenty of information with quality tools available to complete any(almost) MCU project with few new things to learn.
I have not gone through the App Notes or NXP.com thoroughly enough to say wether or not there is more code available or what exists. This is generally an important part of processor selection since it save time and the agonizing redundancy of re-inventing wheels.
So far, two-thumbs up overall...until next time.