Mbed OS 6.10 Brings Standardization for Pin Naming and Usage, Arduino Uno Connectors
"We’ve designed, implemented and deployed new standard pin names and connectors," the company says, "improving your experience with Mbed."
The latest release of Arm's Mbed OS platform comes with a usability modification: a new standard for how pin names are defined and used across all Mbed Enabled development boards.
"Following feedback from the developer community and our ecosystem partners, we wanted to make it easier for developers to reuse or create applications that port across Mbed boards to external components," Arm's Marcelo Salazar explains. "By working with the Analog Devices and ST Microelectronics engineering teams, we’ve designed, implemented and deployed new standard pin names and connectors, improving your experience with Mbed."
Available in Mbed OS 6.10, the new standard focuses on two key areas: General pin naming for LEDs, buttons, and UART as used for interfacing with a PC, with which all boards are expected to comply; and the Arduino Uno connector, which is specific to Arduino Uno-format boards.
"For example," Salazar explains, "in the past, an SPI driver was initialised using: SPI spi(D11, D12, D13); // mosi, miso, sclk. Now when using the signals on the Arduino Uno connector: SPI spi(ARDUINO_UNO_SPI_MOSI, ARDUINO_UNO_SPI_MISO, ARDUINO_UNO_SPI_SCK);.
The new Arduino Uno connector is only the first, too: "We’d like to expand on the standardization to other connectors in the future," Salazar confirms, though without committing to adding additional connector standardization in any particular Mbed OS release.
More details are available in the Mbed OS developer guide, while a porting guide comes complete with tools to help verify compliance. The pin naming standard also forms part of the Mbed Enabled requirements, published on the project's GitHub repository.
