Last week I wrote about one of the latest mbed breakout boards and saw how to rip real-time FTSE100 data of the internet and display it on this 7 segment display board.
So that was cool and got me really excited about what you can do with an mbed in a really short period of time. But not everyone wants the FTSE100 on their desk 24/7 and admittedly I tend to get a bit obsessed with it every time it breaks the 6000.00 index value.
So what else can you do? ‘Lots!’ would be the short answer, but that makes a boring read, so here are some nice simple ideas I had. (The source code for all these project can be found here)
1. Clock – this uses the C time.h library, a nasty little piece of coding if you’re not familiar with it, but on the whole it makes life easy in the long run. I configured my clock to just spit out the time, but you could get it to give the date or the date and time and you can also choose the format i.e. 12hr vs. 24hr clock. [source]
2.Counter - a rising edge counter, nice and simple. I used this as my trigger. [source]
3. Digital thermometer – a bit more sexy (dare I say hotter?) than the clock and the counter. I used a TMP102 chip with I2C interface, which mbed (thankfully!) supports. [source]
4. Rising edge interval timer – this measures the time in milliseconds between rising edges of some simple digital input device – the plan is to use this for mbed robot racing!! [source]
6. Internet write-read program – This is similar to the screenscraping example which I wrote about last week, but without the screen scraping, as in it just retrieves info from the internet – no parsing. I created some php scripts, which accepted any text you type into it and stores it in a text file on a web server on the internet. Then, my mbed reads from the file and displays it on the dispBoB. [source]
7. MAC address viewer - a really short program, which retrieved the individual mbed’s MAC address and scrolled it across the screen. [source]
Although none of these mini-projects were particularly challenging or cutting edge technology-wise, I’d say the mbed certainly makes life easy for you. Several of these took me under 10 minutes and to cook up a small working application in such a short time is extremely satisfying, whatever level of programming background you have.
For a more in depth read, take a look at my mbed page.
