I like the MBED boards, they are small, fast and the libraries and community are great. The only downside is the price. The cheapest official MBED board is around 50 euro’s and some cheaper supported boards like the ST nucleo boards don’t fit in a breadboard. I wanted to make a small MBED compatible dev board that fits in my breadboard and costs a lot less then the real MBED boards so I can just leave them in a project without caring too much.
I decided to use the LPC11U24 as this is one of the two microcontrollers that is also used for the real MBED boards. I have had some bad experiences with the MBED libraries for the ST microcontrollers so I’ll stick to the well supported NXP one. For the rest a SMPS 5V to 3.3V was something I’d wanted. A linear regulator would get a little bit too hot if more then 250mA of current would be requested from the 3.3V line. I also made everything SMD, including the pinheaders. It just feels a bit cleaner for me to have zero through hole parts :)
The end product looks like this and I shall call it: the Tinycortex, because I suck at making names:
It is even a bit smaller then the real MBED, has 32 IO pins and looks cute. What more to wish for :)
In the next post I will show the pinout and how to use it in case anyone makes one and for the people I gave one as a reference.