Sunday 24 January 2010

Pleasant Surprise

My degree is the 'with industrial experience' variant of computer science taught here at Manchester university, which essentially means that I do the first 2 years of my degree then go out and work for a year before finishing the third and final year of the degree. That means I have to find somewhere to work for a year, and one placement I applied for was with the mbed team based at ARM. Unfortunately I didn't get the job (although another equally if not more interesting placement I applied for is looking promising right now :) ), but I was pleasantly surprised to find this arrive with the post recently:


In case you can't read the text on the box in the bad camera-phone photo there, that's an mbed NXP LPC1768 microcontroller. I look forward to playing with it after my current exams end (6 exams is too many by the way...), I'm sure it'll prove to be a fair bit more powerful than my dodgy only-programmable-by-parallel-port arduino which is just visible in the background there. Currently my idea is to rebase my telescope control project around the mbed rather than the arduino and hopefully get some results before the next star party I attend - which gives me about 3 months to get something working.

Anyway, if whomever it was at mbed/ARM that's responsible for sending the mbed ever reads this thank you very much!