I’m not a stranger to the mbed and have written about it a few time now. However with the new Application board available I wanted to give it a go and see if i could use it for a real project. But I’m not one for taking the easy route, so lets try new and different!
I recived my App board back in January around the same time Andrew Back did his blog that looks at what it can do. Not wanting to repeat his good work I wanted to take a different route. Designed to take the original LPC1768 ‘blue’ mbed, I wondered if and how much I could do using the low power LPC11U24 ‘Yellow’ mbed.
So I started off by looking at Andrew blog and trying to repeat the same functions as follows and see if they also work. I was pleased to see that I had no issues running most of the Demos. I started with my own code and found it easy to use the LCD and Joystick straight off. I did a little bit of code for the two potentiometer inputs thats not on the mbed side as an example and these work fine too.
At this point I started to run into some of the limiting features of the LPC11U24. For example not having a PWM output or analog output means you can dive the speaker, analog out or PWM the brightness of the RGB LEDs. However you can turn the RGB LEDs on and off without a problem. The USB can only be used in a device mode (not host a USB flash drive for example) and the ethernet is not available. However for a small embedded application you don't always need all these and so was fine with that.
The temperature sensor worked great and so did the serial interface. Speaking of which I wanted to try something not covered by Andrew, Xbee.
I posted a blog about using the Xbee back in 2012 where I used them to link my m3pi mbed powered robot back to my PC. So I decided it would be run to have the application board talk to the m3pi robot over Xbee. Having had the two devices pre configured meant I only had to fit them to the m3pi and Application board and write some code. My code would read the joystick input on the application board and send a message to the mbed on the m3pi. This worked great and with only a small hiccup when I forget to put the right jumpers on the robot. In fact it worked so well that when I showed my daughter (aged 12) who is really not interested in geeky stuff, I had to prise it out her hands she enjoyed playing with it so much!
So in all I was very pleased to see that even with the limited features of the LPC11U24 that it could still get a lot of use out of the application board.
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Many thanks
Paul (aka @monpjc)