Over at DesignSpark, they posted a preview of an upcoming ‘Lab Board’ for the mbed microcontroller.  It is pretty insane what they have fit onto a credit card sized board.  Here are some of the included features:

• 128 x 32 graphics backlit LCD, SPI interface
• 3-axis accelerometer, +/- 1.5g, I2C interface
• Temperature sensor, I2C interface
• 5-way navigation switch (Thumb joystick)
• 2 x Potentiometers
• RGB LED, PWM connected
• Miniature loudspeaker, PWM connected
• Socket headers for Xbee Zigbee module or RN-XV Wifi module
• 2 x 3.5mm audio jack (Analogue In/Out)
• 2 x standard R/C servo motor headers
• Mini-USB connector (keyboard, mouse, MIDI)
• USB-A connector (Flash drive, Bluetooth, GSM Modem(UK Only))
• RJ-45 Ethernet connector
• 1.3mm 6 to 9Vdc jack socket (Powering USB-A and Servo headers)
• And of course the double-row header for the LPC1768 mbed module itself

Watch out for the official announcement on Twitter.

mbed + extras – LPC1768 development board [v5.1]. The mbed is a tool for rapid prototyping with microcontrollers using the beefy LPC1768 ARM Cortex M3 chip. While it looks like a classic breadboard-friendly breakout board, this dev board has a few tricks up its sleeve. First of all, underneath the PCB is a second LPC chip which acts as the programmer: when plugging into a USB port the mbed shows up as a flash drive and programs can be ‘dragged’ onto it for uploading. This makes it easy to program without an external device, and makes bricking impossible. There’s also a bunch of indicator LEDs, and a little flash storage chip as well.

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