The eagerly awaited collection of new Mbed boards have arrived from STM. The STM Nucleo range are budget priced, Cortex development boards with Arduino compatible shield connectors, integral ST-Link programmer and are fully supported on the Mbed development platform. If you haven’t encountered Mbed you’re missing a trick. Mbed is a free on-line IDE that has a host of library functions available that can be easily added to any project. Moving your program to the target device is a simple drag and drop process.

The new Nucleo boards are fantastic value priced at just under £8 each from Farnell. The four boards in the initial launch cover M0, M3 and M4 Cortex processors with an assortment of ADCs, DACs and communications interfaces.