[TriEmbed] MBED library ecosystem

[Alex Davis]

I’ve been trying MBED for a few weeks now and thought I’d comment on the overall ‘ecosystem’ it provides. On the surface, there’s a good choice of boards and plenty of libraries. Deeper in, it’s somewhat of a mess.

I’m already aware of the microARM vs ARM C issue with the boards, which caused issues due to lack of standard C functions. Recently I’ve found there are issues with both libraries and code, in terms of hardware support and dependencies. In my case, I’m trying to play a wav file while simultaneously doing other things in threads, like PWM for LEDs. I’ve yet to find a SDFileSystem which works properly with a wavfile library for FRDM-K64F, not to mention one that works in an MBED RTOS thread.

Many of the examples in the MBED repo have hardware descriptor headers which are out-of-date, necessitating an update of MBED before compiling. That’s fine, but doing this usually breaks the other libraries, and I’ve yet to successfully get code working where I had to go past updating just mbed.h. If that doesn’t do it, you’re on a wild goose chase.

I’ll have to go back yet again and see how well TI has done in providing working libraries for the launchpad add-on boards in CCS. It’s valuable to me to not have to re-invent libraries for things like displays, sensors, and storage. I guess I’m lazy and need libraries AND working examples. I just don’t have the time to do it all from the ground-up.

BTW I found my FRDM-K64F pin D8/PTA0 is actually not wired to the correct pin on the MCU! It’s attached instead to something to do with the JTAG debugger interface. I went nuts trying to figure out why an LED would not light, only to stumble upon a MBED post which explained the situation. Luckily I was able to lift a leg on a resistor and move it over to D7 and get it working.

I’ll keep plugging on the MBED stuff but I have a few projects in the queue which are going to continue to be ATMEL-based, just because they’re simple and I know ATTINY/ATMEGA very well.


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