Skip to main content
There can’t be many people who don't know about the ARM mbed. This has been right up there with the Arduino as the standard for development boards for some time now. However over the last year we have been seeing more and more of the new and shinny little brother mbed which is lower cost than the current mbed.

The new mbed uses the all new ARM Cortex-M0, a low power micro that only uses 3uW/Mhz with under 12k gates. So until the new ARM “Fly catcher” comes along this is one of the best low power 32bit chips available. So the nice people at ARM have built this into the new mbed NXP LPC11U24.

When the kit arrived you would think is was just another mbed. The kit includes everything you get in the larger mbed, usb cable, stickers and wicked card displaying pin outs. The new mbed uses the same online compiler and is just as easy to program and is even pin compatible. So at first glance the new mbed is just as easy to use as the current one. So where are the differences.? Well the price is a big factor. I was never convinced that £40 was a good price for the mbed, but having used one for some time I have grown to see it value. The new mbed however is only £29 making it a very entry level price for hobbyist.

The new M0 core is no great loss in performance either when you consider the types of projects most people use the mbed for. Running at half the speed. 48Mhz is still quite zippy for a embedded micro. The real drop off is in memory, only having 32K flash and 8K RAM compared to the 512K and 32K of the M3 core in the larger mbed.
With regard to the I/O you are getting most of what you have on the larger mbed. However the loss of a Ethernet, USB Host and CAN my be too much for some. However all the other ports are there only dropping one I2C port (no real loss there!). However you will be getting more PWM outputs. With 8 in total this could become a very good option for robot builders driving lots of servos.

I was going to spend time talking about how well it runs and talk about a few projects I tried out on it. But to be honest for a embedded micro is did all I really wanted and I did even forget that it was the smaller mbed at one point. It just worked and all we want most of the time!
So ARM have given us a real choice now, the smaller mustard yellow ultra low power and better on the pocket LPC11U24, or the more feature rich Ethernet USB monster in the blue mbed we have all grown to love.

Which ever you use I don't think you will be disappointed with the boards, the online support and easy to use compiler (compared to other third party compilers).

Thanks

Paul (@monpjc)

DesignSpark Electrical Logolinkedin