The mbed is a tool for rapid prototyping with the NXP LPC1768 ARM MCU. This MCU is an ARM Cortex-M3 Core running at 96MHz, 512KB FLASH, 64KB RAM and includes Ethernet, USB (Device and Host), CAN, SPI, I2C and other I/O. The mbed’s design includes 0.1″ DIP breadboard compatible pins It may be powered by either USB or an external power source. When plugged into your computer it appears as a USB disk, and you just drag on your .bin files. On the downside, the provided compiler is online only (no download), and the board sells for $60. You can check out the mbed handbook here.
Circuit Cellar magazine is conducting a design challenge involving the use of the mbed NXP LPC1768 prototyping board and mbed online “Cloud” compiler to develop an innovative hardware- or software-based application. Examples include a product prototype, reusable library, component interface, or reference design that can be shared on mbed.org to help others build their prototypes even faster. $10,000 in prizes will be awarded. Deadline for submissions is February 28, 2011. Good luck!
AFAIK you can still use gcc-arm to program the mbed boards. You might need to use JTAG to fix the bootloader first though.
I’m fairly certain the JTAG pins are not fully wired out on that board… Which is why I wound up deciding against it.
If you want an Ethernet-enabled ARM Cortex-M3 dev board, TI/Luminary’s LM3S6965 eval kit is very reasonably priced and includes an OpenOCD compatible (FT2232-based) debug interface right on the board.
The online compiler is an interesting idea. I had wondered in the past if the EULAs of the non-free compilers from PIC/HITECH etc prevent a similar service being setup for the hobbyist community.
The idea is you have a simple web front end that accepts a ZIP of source and a make file. The web app unzips it, runs make, zips up the result and returns it as a download. There are obviously some security issues running executable content (the make file) from an untrusted source, but I don’t think it’s difficult to fix that.
The main problem with the online compiler that I can see is that you’re now at the companies mercy with respect to compiler version changes breaking things, or them stopping hosting the compiler.
Anyone who has seen the differences between AVR-GCC 3.x and 4.x will know that compiler changes can be a big problem.