Electronic – mbed as a programmer

mbedprogrammer

For those of you that haven't heard of the mbed I'd highly recommend having a look at it for rapid prototyping!

So, the mbed is a 100MHz microprocessor that appears as a usb mass storage device when you plug it into a computer via USB. You can program it by using an online IDE which spits out compiled binary files you can drag-drop into the drive (on any OS) making it a very versatile and very easy to use tool for beginners (like myself!)

As with all of these programmable ICs they have a limited number of IO pins, so if you wanted to drive 150 LEDs individually you'd need to have some kind of intermediatry control device. I'm considering using ATtiny devices to do just that:

  1. Is using ATtiny devices a good way to achieve control over a large number of LEDs? (considering my lack of experience with hardware)
  2. Would it be hard to port the code from the arduino ISP so that I could use my mbed as a programmer for programming ATtiny?
  3. Am I better off using PIC chips?

Many thanks!

Best Answer

I'd would rather use a shift register for this purpose (such as this one):

  • they are cheaper than a microcontroller
  • they are handier to drive a large number of led
  • code will be located only on the Mbed. Think that you'll have to update code on both the Mbed and the ATtiny at some point: juggling with different microcontrollers, tools and languages may become a real hassle.
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