What do we think about mBed?

Yes, this is deliberately in the Arduino forum, not the mBed one, so we can get some honest opinions. :grinning:

mBed has come on a way since the last time it was discussed here. So, what does the group think about mBed OS as an operating system? It looks superficially similar to FreeRTOS. Any experience?

How about the general developer experience? The libraries? Anything else?

I've got some views of my own but I don't want to colour the discussion just yet.

new Arduino boards use core based on mbed :frowning:

I have not been impressed by the API documentation. I suppose I should be grateful that there is any at all though.

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Have "we" been told anything about what this (the boards that run MBed OS, like the rp2040 Connect) does for us, other than permit (usually) a radio stack to co-exist with traditional arduino code?

@westfw , the alternative cores without mbed work fine with same MCU.

for RP2040 there is the core by Earle F. Philhower.

for nRF52840 Adafruit has a core (based on Sandeep Mistry's nRF5 core) (but it doesn't work with Nano 33 BLE or Nicla because the linker script is for uf2 bootloader (and deleted the Arduino bootloader on my Nano BLE. now I plan to try with the uf2 bootloader. ))

for STM32H747XI (Portenta) STM has support in the STM32 core

@in0 I agree, despite the slick, corporate website, it appears to be particularly poorly documented.

Simply having an API reference doesn't provide any context.

I got involved with mBed when they were migrating from the old OS2 to OS6, and it was a dreadful experience - the forum was alight with complaints about bugs, incompatibilities, and so on.

They were also introducing their mBed Studio IDE, which I found to be the most ugly, obtuse, unintuitive and generally clunky IDE I'd ever used. It introduced a number of UI behaviours which didn't match Windows, Mac or Linux conventions, so it always felt obstructive and weird.

I needed a microcontroller with two ADCs, and I had a terrible job finding a driver that let me work with both ADCs. In the end I gave up.

What I don't understand is what it brings to the party that FreeRTOS doesn't already do. Can anyone explain that bit?

Another question: how does mBed integrate with Arduino?

I can visualise how you could use the Arduino IDE to write code for an mBed-based board, but surely the Arduino libraries don't support real-time operating systems, do they? There is no multi-threading in Arduino, so how would you make use of the mBed OS?

What about the bootloader? It is fundamentally different between Arduino and mBed, isn't it?

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