Development environment
A great feature of mbed microcontrollers is the way you develop for them: the development environment is available online, on the official site.
If you connect your microcontroller in the USB port of your PC, your OS detects it as a mass storage device (like a pendrive):
If you browse it, you can find an HTML page with a personal code you need to register on mbed website:
After being registered, you can start developing:
It’s very easy to program your mbed: you only need to save the compiled program on it (in the screenshot below I’m just downloading and running an example program):
Your first program
To start developing, follow the Compiler link on the top right:
The IDE opens in a new window: with a right-click on My Programs you can start a new program:
After having written your code, you can compile it with a click on Compile button: your program will be compiled and the bytecode will be automatically downloaded on your PC:
To run your program, simply save the .bin file on your mbed:
You can also share your code on your personal page:
Here’s a video about the program running on my mbed:
Conclusions
With this post, I’ve just introduced some mbed features: in the next ones I’m going to show you some additional features like versioning and more complex examples… stay tuned!