With TestBed for mbed we offer a development board which is richly equipped with extras to easily unleash the power of the mbed module. While developing this carrier board, we tried to consequently follow the spirit of Rapid Prototyping and therefore providing the user with lots of possibilities for hardware expansions around the mbed.

Most important are the communication interfaces. With USB, RS485, CAN and RS232-TTL, various communication gateways are available. For mbed, an ethernet connection is mandatory, so TestBed comes with a RJ45 jack with magnetics and two signalling LEDs included.

A backlit alphanumeric LC-Display (LCD20X4BLU) can be mounted directly on the TestBed for displaying status information. GPIO-saving 4 bit mode is used to drive the display. Contrast of the LCD is adjustable using a trim pot mounted on TestBed.

Another highlight is TestBed's ability of getting Arduino-Shields attached to it. That provides amazing new possibilities using the wide variety of available shields - combined with the immense calculating power of mbed's modern Cortex-M3 heart!

To support wireless communication features an XBee-socket has been added to TestBed as well. We offer several wireless modules with the popular XBee footprint, for example: Original Xbee-Modules, a 868MHz RF module, a GPS-Receiver and this Bluetooth solution.