Hope you all had a fab extended chocolate eating festival weekend – I had a lovely one, thanks! I had some time to play with my new mbed microcontroller. It’s a powerful little thing for rapid prototyping, for example it has a mighty ARM chip, it supports lots of interfaces and is simple to connect to your pooter of choice via USB and uploading code is really quick, so is great for tinkering with lots of iterations – read more about mbed’s specs here! Interestingly it has a web interface for compiling – will see how I get on with this over time 🙂
So my first two experiments:
I ported my TwinkleStarduino code, slightly modified for C++ classes (as mbed’s support library is different to what the Processing compiler uses). The two handy LEDS on the front of the mbed were used to make Hello Kitty’s eyes pulse to the tune of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ – I used a paper image from a notebook for HK.
For my second, I used a simple 16 character black on green LCD display, connected to a breadboard by soldering a pin strip to it and ran a scrolling text script on the mbed.
