They’re all over the place already!

Microcontrollers are all around us in common use all the time. You might be surprised with the number of microcontrollers you interact with on a daily basis. You may be woken by a digital alarm clock, make toast in a toaster, cook food in a microwave, listen to the radio over breakfast, check your emails on your smart phone, change TV channels with a handheld remote. All of these things are likely to involve interactions with microcontrollers. That’s just the tip of the iceberg though – so many things that we take for granted and interact with on a daily basis contain microcontrollers –things like cars and traffic signals, appliances and entertainment devices in our homes, medical devices and toys. If it has buttons and a digital display you can generally assume that it’s controlled by a microcontroller.

But there’s scope for so much more...

Despite the fact that we are already surrounded by products and embedded systems based on microcontrollers, there are endless possibilities for their use in so many more applications. The flexibility and sophistication of modern 32-bit microcontrollers, with ultra low power consumption, rich connectivity, signal processing capabilities and peripheral interfaces could potentially enable the development of revolutionary new products, and the enhancement of existing ones.

So what puts people off?

When you start to think about the myriad of things that you could do with a sophisticated, powerful 32-bit microcontroller, it’s a wonder that they are not being used more. So what puts people off? Well, if you’ve ever thought about prototyping an idea for an electronic product or gadget, you may have realised how daunting that seems if you’re not an electronics design engineer. Conceptually simple things can turn out quite difficult to prototype.

If you were an inventor or entrepreneur or an industrial design engineer with no electronics design experience, you might just take one look at the tasks ahead of you and simply give up – or face the prospect of hiring an expensive consultant to do the initial prototyping work for you. The result of this is that many project ideas don’t even get prototyped due to the lack of time, technical expertise and/or financial resources.

What if things were different though?

What if you didn’t have to make all those technical choices when thinking about prototyping a product? What if you didn’t have to spend loads of money on sophisticated development tools? What if there was a large pool of code and functionality available to use quickly to build your prototype? Perhaps, if any or all of these were true, many more projects would get off the ground.

Well, fortunately help is at hand. Cambridge company, ARM, has developed a product especially aimed at rapid prototyping. The mbed package offers a plug and play microprocessor board, based on a sophisticated 32 bit microcontroller, along with all the discrete components needed to provide a rich set of functionality. With a lightweight online compiler, high level APIs and a vibrant developer community with a growing base of example projects and shared code, it’s the perfect way to get up and running in no time (setup and run “hello world in 60 seconds!)

Now imagine you've realised that your products or equipment could benefit from microcontroller technology. Maybe remote diagnostics or data logging would put them clearly ahead of the competition, or open up markets that you can’t currently serve. Perhaps some intelligent control or complex sensing could make your product perform better in its role. It could be that you just want to learn more to see how your industry could take advantage of this microcontroller revolution. In each of the cases, mbed is an ideal solution.

Until now, the barriers to prototyping have been high enough to deter all but the most determined. The mbed Rapid Prototyping platform bridges the gap between identifying the application of microcontrollers and investing in expensive tools or contractors. By making the latest in microcontroller development available in an accessible way, mbed enables a wide audience to adopt the technology and experiment with new designs at the rapid prototype stage. With an initial rapid prototype complete, and the concept proven, investing in tools and expertise is a much smaller risk.

Rapid Prototyping with 32-bit Microcontrollers Workshop

The ESP KTN has joined forces with ARM to run a workshop for people interested in exploring the possibilities of rapid prototyping with a product like the mbed board. This workshop will be a one-day event held in Cambridge on 29^th July.

It is aimed at:

• Designers, individuals and companies who are likely to want to develop prototypes of their inventions in the future
• people who want to find innovative, quick solutions to control and instrumentation problems
• companies that have existing products in need of refreshing (e.g. the addition of internet connectivity, better performance, lower power, greater capabilities, etc)

What you will gain from this workshop

• learn about the possibilities of rapid prototyping with the mbed board
• learn how to set up the mbed board, download and run the "Hello World" programme within 60 seconds!
• learn about the lightweight, online compiler and libraries of free code that can be used in minutes

• ARM/NXP mbed board
• Breadboard
• Breakout board
• Selection of sensors and other components

Mbed workshop Agenda

10.00     Arrival, registration, coffee, social

10.30     Presentation – About the KTN (30 mins)

11.00     Presentation – Introduction to mbed (45 mins)

11.45     mbed Hello World

13.00     Lunch & Social

14.00     Presentation (About Vendor 15 mins)

14.15     Freeform lab