25 October 2010
RS Components today announced that it is sponsoring internships with the ARM® mbed team, based at ARM’s Cambridge, England headquarters to develop mbed hardware and software reference designs that will be featured on DesignSpark, the online electronic design gateway powered by RS.
The first projects, a motor control platform and an RFID tag tracker using an mbed processor, are already complete and can be downloaded at www.designspark.com. Both are ready to use and can be adapted to suit specific project requirements. The development process is presented on DesignSpark in a blog format including photos, diagrams, links and notes alongside the completed design and associated software libraries. Further designs are underway.
“The objective of our program is to give developers a head start with common requirements, and to enrich DesignSpark with design resources of real value based on one of the most popular processor environments in the industry today,” said Mark Cundle, Technical Marketing Manager, RS Components. “Solutions to common problems, worked examples and ease of use all help to free up engineer’s time to innovate and add value. This is exactly what RS Components and ARM have both set out to achieve”.
The Motor Control Reference Design demonstrates how to control motors using the RS-EDP-AM-MC1 motor control modules and provide feedback with quadrature encoders, and inertial sensors such as gyroscopes and accelerometers to perform dead reckoning. It allows feedback from sensors to be used for position control, orientation data to be logged, providing the capability for autonomous control. The RFID tag tracker logs Mifare tag IDs on a remote MySQL server through Ethernet or GPRS, and can log events locally on an SD card. Both are based on the Cortex-M3 processor-based NXP LPC1768 MCU and are supported by relevant software drawn from the mbed libraries.
Chris Styles, Senior Application Engineer at ARM, added, “These two designs show how powerful and flexible the combination of mbed and EDP is. In both cases, the designers were able to use EDP hardware modules and software from the mbed library to reach a complete, working and verified
design quickly. We have documented the process that they went through as well as the completed design on the mbed and DesignSpark websites.”
ARM and RS are recruiting for internships to support the RS program.
About mbed
mbed is a tool for rapid prototyping with microcontrollers.The mbed Compiler lets you write programs in C/C++, and then compile and download them to run on the mbed microcontroller. It's all online, so you don't need to be a sys-admin to start. In fact, you don't have to install or setup anything to get started. For more information go to: http://mbed.org/
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