ARM starting platform

[rstofer]

I think his point is that Arduino is not just good for the Uno nor even AVR boards, nor is mbed limited to the LPC1768 - i.e. these tools allow you to program just as easily on much more featured platforms.

Of course!  I have 3 of the STM32F boards sitting right here.  The mbed toolchain handles all of them.

For example instead of your Arduino Uno you might want to get an ESP8266 board instead, it'll be able to do all the Uno does just the same way, plus 10x more so that when you're bored of blinking LEDs (i.e. quickly, given the simplicity) you can start playing with a webserver.

How odd you would bring that up.  I was just looking at the ESP8266 board (and concept) earlier this morning.  I'm not so sure that it is a board for a new user.  I didn't see it in the dropdown list of boards on the Arduino IDE.  Maybe I missed it...  Nevertheless, I couldn't find enough documentation to answer one simple question:  Can it have 4 concurrent connections?  I suppose right after that I would want to know about throughput.

As to Arduino, I use it strictly to knock together some simple examples.  The last time I used it, all I wanted was "Hello World!" out the serial port so I could test my Rigol DS1054Z serial decoder.  There is no platform out there that is faster for doing that kind of thing.

[Kilrah]

It's not in by default, but Arduino 1.6.4+ has a library manager - you just go in there and install the ESP8266 lib.

I bought 2 of this board, has a bunch of IO wired, the USB -> serial converter on board and battery power input/charger for mobile fun.

It took me half a day to find a basic webserver example, a WS2812 example written for Arduino that ran straight without mods, sample code for a graphic LCD that needed minor mods (the library is 3 years old), and to merge all of those into a single basic program. So yeah pretty easy, almost too much... Now need to actually make my application out of those.

No idea about multiple connections and I believe throughput is pretty low so you won't run a router or fileserver on it, but it's great to provide basic remote access/control capabilities.

[janoc]

You forgot that , at anytime you can export from mbed to any major compiler plataform, and from there you can do anything you want outside mbed world, By the way mbed comes from ARM company the ones that makes the basic IP for any arm on the market.
...
Does not have any single reason to at least know the mbed plataform.

And you have completely missed my point. Yes, certainly you can do that. But why to add complexity to a problem that is complex enough already for no reason?

If you end up using mBed just to initialize the board + setup GPIO and have to use other frameworks (or resort to registers) for the rest, what's the point of mBed's overhead when you aren't using any of its advantages?

If all you want is some very basic stuff then mBed on STM32 will work. But anything beyond that is a pain. Sadly. On the NXP LPC1768 it works fine, though.

[rstofer]

If you end up using mBed just to initialize the board + setup GPIO and have to use other frameworks (or resort to registers) for the rest, what's the point of mBed's overhead when you aren't using any of its advantages?

Maybe just mix-and-match.  I needed that interrupt driven SPI slave - mbed doesn't have it so I wrote it.  I also needed networking and mbed DID have it and that saved me a ton of coding.

You're right though, if all you want to do is blink an LED, you certainly don't need the mbed framework.  The toolchain is useful either way.

[janoc]

Maybe just mix-and-match.  I needed that interrupt driven SPI slave - mbed doesn't have it so I wrote it.  I also needed networking and mbed DID have it and that saved me a ton of coding.

You're right though, if all you want to do is blink an LED, you certainly don't need the mbed framework.  The toolchain is useful either way.

Yes, certainly - nothing wrong with the approach. That's not my point, though. I just wouldn't advocate something like that for a beginner when the exact CPU/devboard don't really matter and there are better options available where mBed supports more on-board hardware.

[ebclr]

The point of mbed is to use several different arm processor from different vendors and a unique device, that can be easily  replaced, You don't need to get deeper into datasheets finding register to initialize, is everything done on a transparent way. Besides that you can to the bare metal just in case you want that,  On the minimum is a free online KEIL compiler

[janoc]

The point of mbed is to use several different arm processor from different vendors and a unique device, that can be easily  replaced, You don't need to get deeper into datasheets finding register to initialize, is everything done on a transparent way. Besides that you can to the bare metal just in case you want that,  On the minimum is a free online KEIL compiler

Please, read what I wrote before you miss the point again and argue about something that is not even in dispute.