build-a-scrolling-led-messageboard-in-one-day

The microcontroller market has become a very competitive with lots of players, big and small. But there are also a lot of potential clients and this is why microcontroller manufacturers try to make their products increasingly accessible and attractive to use.

It started with cheap and even free tools, and then came the cheap evaluation boards. The mbed platform from NXP and ARM (developed and hosted by ARM) goes a step further by combining a cheap but powerful board with free preinstalled tools. This is a real plug & play solution. When you connect the board to a USB port you can open an HTML file that takes you directly to the online development environment where you can start programming straight away. Nothing to install — hardly anything to learn — mbed can be used immediately, even by a novice. It is not surprising that EDN magazine awarded the platform the Innovation Award 2010 in the category Software/Embedded Tools.

Here at Elektor we put the mbed platform to the test; we ran a project to see if it is as easy as NXP and ARM have us believe. We built a 3-color 32×64 LED message board with a USB interface that can display several pages of text, scrolling or not. The results are published on the Elektor embedded blog. The article shows that the only hardware needed is an LED panel, an mbed module and a push button, no other components whatsoever! The programming was so easy thanks to the many built-in functions that the total development time was no more than about one day.

A video shows the working message board, the circuit diagram and source code are available for free downloading so you can try it out for yourself.