11 years, 2 months ago.

Will target designations on mbed tools be changed to more flexible terms?

The release of the mbed SDK as open source will lead to many ports to MCUs from different vendors. Will target designations on build tools be changed to the MCU family instead of the ARM core? For example, currently "M3" represents the LPC1768 mbed but there are many other potential Cortex-M3 targets from NXP (LPC1300, LPC1800), ST Micro (STM32F1,F2), Atmel (AT91SAM3) and others. Peripheral drivers have significant changes from one vendor to another. The same applies to the current "M0", "ARM7" and future "M4", "ARM9", etc.

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1 Answer

11 years, 2 months ago.

J Alvarez wrote:

Will target designations on build tools be changed to the MCU family instead of the ARM core?

The build tools are targeting mbed boards, not ARM cores. The command line option is using the core names as short mnemonics for the actual board.

mbed is trying to give the best possible "out of the box" experience targeting specific mbed boards, rather than families of microcontrollers. This is not planned to change.

In other words, when a target is added to the official mbed SDK everything will be correctly configured (clock frequency, memory map, pinout, etc), without any additional configuration delegated to the final user.

The offline command line option strings used to specify the target mbed board will change during time to be as user friendly and memorable as possible.

Cheers, Emilio

Accepted Answer

Thanks. Using the board as the target designation on build options is a better choice than using MCU family or the current ARM core designation ("M3", "M0"). Boards using the same MCU will share most drivers but also include board-specific peripherals.

posted by J Alvarez 06 Mar 2013