NXP Semiconductors announced that the latest (version 2) release of its popular LPCXpresso development boards now fully support the ARM® mbed™ platform, giving embedded engineers more choice and flexibility when developing advanced applications for LPC and mbed microcontroller platforms.
As lead partner on ARM's mbed project, NXP was heavily involved in launching the mbed platform and was first to offer an official mbed solution, based on the NXP LPC1768 MCU. The mbed platform has since grown in popularity and feature set, now providing free software libraries, hardware designs and online tools for professional rapid prototyping of products based on ARM microcontrollers. Since its introduction in 2010, the revolutionary LPCXpresso development platform - with its full-featured Eclipse-based IDE and flexible target boards - has provided exceptional value to embedded engineers with an evaluation-to-production solution for developing MCU applications for NXP LPC microcontrollers.
Today, mbed support in LPCXpresso v2 boards represents an important alignment of both platforms, with benefits to both LPC and non-LPC developers including:
- LPC and mbed developers can access hardware schematics and open source software available through both the mbed.org and LPCWare.com communities
- Developers can easily export projects from mbed to LPCXpresso environments and more effectively leverage both communities for support, code, and other resources
- mbed developers will have more choices for MCU selection and prototyping features, for example LPCXpresso v2 boards incorporate features not found on many mbed-enabled boards, such as Arduino UNO shield connectors for flexible expansion, including Wi-Fi or Bluetooth®.
Used in conjunction with new generation of LPCXpresso v2 target boards, the LPCXpresso platform also includes the v7.1 LPCXpresso IDE, providing a quick way to evaluate and develop advanced applications for NXP LPC microcontrollers. The latest LPCXpresso toolchain, v7.1, includes multiple improvements in compiler optimizations, IDE speed and feature set, access to ARM’s latest new lib-nano C library for smaller and more efficient code generation, and support for Segger’s popular debug probe and related utilities. To date NXP has shipped over 110,000 LPCXpresso boards worldwide.
