mbed and ARM EB185 Board.

[KeithSloan]

Is there anyway an Matrix Multimedia ARM Board could be used as part of a mbed system see http://mbed.org/?

It seems to me that there a number of "Open" like microprocessor developments like arduino and mbed and it would be good to see such systems have the ability to take advantage of E-Blocks and Flowcode.

[KeithSloan]

Better Idea. How about Matrix designing a board that supports various E-Blocks and can have an mbed plugged in as a daughter board. Make any necessary changes to Flowcode to support. Then sell loads of the boards, E-Blocks and Flowcode to the mbed community.

Please can I have a free sample for coming up with the suggestion

[Steve]

Unfortunately, we do not support the ARM processor used on the MBED module.

Have you seen our ECIO modules? These are fully supported by Flowcode and are similar to MBED devices. We have versions for PIC and ARM processors. And there is an E-block adaptor board which allows the ECIOs to be used E-blocks. The schematics for our E-blocks and ECIOs are publicly available, and there is information available on creating your own E-blocks.

We also have support for the Arduino platform (see a recent article on these forums).

The recent spate of "open" microprocessor developments are interesting, but is the Arduino software open-source? It seems that only the hardware designs and the bootloader are publicly available.

[KeithSloan]

"Unfortunately, we do not support the ARM processor used on the MBED module."

Well I think Matrix Multimedia are missing a trick. I think mbed and Arduino platforms are going to attract a much bigger following than Matrix Multimedia with their own products.

Creating products that marry mbed and arduino with E-Blocks and Flowcode is in my opinion a golden opportunity.
But Matrix Multimedia is not my company otherwise I would be issuing a edict to make this happen.

As they say "Your loss" in my opinion

[Benj]

Hello,

The MBED devices do look quite good if you want onboard CAN or Ethernet. Other then that they are basically ECIO's.

Supporting the MBED device with Flowcode would be months of development work and put simply would not pay for itself. Also seeing as we can currently do anything that the MBED can do using an ECIO and E-blocks there seems little reason for tackling this at the moment.

Finally both the Arduino and MBED devices use C code and free compilers so the current user base are used to writing in C for free. Although I was once a C coder I much prefare Flowcode now as it saves an incredible amount of time but I think converting other C programmers may be a bit of an uphill struggle.

Flowcode for AVR supports Arduido boards so its really only the MBED devices eg NXP ARM chips that are not currently supported. We are working on a way of doing things for v5 which may allow us to start supporting more target devices such as the NXP devices but this is not been confirmed as of yet.

[KeithSloan]

"Also seeing as we can currently do anything that the MBED can do using an ECIO and E-blocks there seems little reason for tackling this at the moment."

TOTALLY misses the point. mbed are going to sell orders of magnitude more devices than ECIO and hence would be a bigger market that you could exploit. Just look at the competition that Elektor are sponsoring http://www.circuitcellar.com/nxpmbeddes ... onsors.htm

I know a number of people who were into PIC processors that are now upgrading to Arduino and mbeds, they are not going to be buying ECIO's. If one could easily plug E-Blocks into mbeds and/or Aruinio's then they maybe in the market for E-Blocks.

[Steve]

Hi Keith,

I agree - allowing Flowcode and/or E-blocks to support MBED could be a good opportunity. But at the present time it is just too much effort for us to undertake that development.

I'm also not sure that someone who has bought an MBED module for £39 will want to then spend £149 on Flowcode. But for an existing Flowcode user who is considering MBED, an ECIO module (prices start at £16.50) might be a more suitable option.

It's also true to say that MBED devices are going to sell in much larger quantities than ECIOs by virtue of the marketing muscle that NXP has. But to exploit that market, we would also need a large marketing effort - it's not just about having the right product. If we had that kind of marketing effort, people would have been talking about ECIOs two years ago in the same way that people now talk about MBEDs!!

Personally, I love our ECIO modules. They're so simple to use, and in conjunction with Flowcode you can create some quite functional programs with very little effort (and no C code, unless you want to!). The USB components of Flowcode are also well-suited to the ECIO and make PC connectivity applications so easy. But I think a lot of people don't actually understand what ECIOs are and what they can offer.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to point out that the FREE versions of Flowcode (PICmicro and ARM) work with our ECIO modules. That makes an incredibly cheap solution for someone wanting to start out with USB-enabled embedded programming.