Two quirks observed with MBED Studio 1

Mbed Studio
1

I’ve been playing with MBED Studio with a couple of different boards. One of the boards was an old LPC1768 (LPC1768) dev board I had.

It’s nice to see that MBED Studio was able to detect this board as it asked whether I wanted to set this board as the active selection. MBED Studio then makes the “Run” and “Debug” buttons active too.

I compiled and uploaded the Blinky (MBED 6) program, and was able to flash (run) the program from the IDE. No quirks observed.

I also had the Blinky-5 (MBED 5) example downloaded into my IDE. I decided to select this example and made it active.

What I was not expecting (as behaviour) was that MBED Studio reverted back to the board (or target) I had used to compile Blinky-5 before I switched to this target. So MBED Studio automatically changed the target for some reason.

I suspect that there is a valid reason for this… but I see this as odd behaviour. (EDIT… the reason I see this is “odd” behaviour is that the code example selection process within Studio differs to that seen in the online version. There are pros and cons to linking code to a target/board once compiled, but it should not be automatic. There should, at the very least, be some indication to the user within the IDE that the target is switching from current to that linked in the code example selected etc.)

Once manually reverting back to the correct target, I compiled and could flash(run) the example.

Now, for some unknown reason (as in, I cannot now recreate the problem), the Blinky-5 program had caused an exception on LPC1768 (LPC1768) yesterday, but now having recompiled and run it works fine.

When this exception occurred it displayed an error message on the serial console (it definitely was not in output or debug screens). What was odd about this (possibly another quirk), was that I could not select the text output in the Serial monitor as I wanted to cut and paste the reference given into my browser.

Hope these observations help.

2

Hi Gerriko,

Thank you for reporting those issues and for providing detailed information.

  • Board switching: It is not a bug. Mbed Studio is saving the board selection per each program in the workspace. It means that when switching the active program it will select automatically the active target to match the last selected target for that program.
  • Copying in serial console should be enabled by default. You can check it in preferences: Menu->File->Preferences->Serialmonitor. There is however a bug that a selection color doesn’t appear so it looks like it can’t be selected. You should however be able to copy a text there using ctrl+c. Thank you for reporting it. We will try to fix it in upcoming release. In the future we are also looking at allowing the serial output to be saved in file and adding a button for clearing the output in serial panel.

Thanks,
Arek - Mbed Studio team

3

Thanks for the clarification. Saving serial output to a file will be a much welcomed feature. Similarly clearing output from console.