I've got one of the NXP mbed boards, and it's an interesting piece of hardware, however, the current mbed toolchain is kind of ridiculous. In order to use the more interesting features, you're pretty much required to use their web-based IDE, and forego a lot of the nice features of, say, eclipse. Also, I have issues with certain decisions they've made, like having floating point only libraries for PWM, which means you have to waste a lot of clocks, and code, just to make the lights work.

Then again, with AVRs, I'm using Atmel Studio a lot these days for similar reasons instead of the Arduino environment. The abstraction layers don't quite mesh with what I'm trying, which means writing I'm writing around the Arduino a lot more than I'm writing for the Arduino. Perhaps it's just time for getting back to basics with the lower level libraries.

With regards to PWM issues you've mentioned , have you looked at alternative libraries ? a rough search brough me this[1](and there might be others), an it claims to solve most of the floating point problem.

>> In order to use the more interesting features, you're pretty much required to use their web-based IDE,

What features are those ?

[1]http://developer.mbed.org/users/jocis/code/HighPWM/docs/923b...

I looked a bit at some of the alternative libraries, but was frustrated with the environment due to the slowdowns in trying to use it during peak hours. Perhaps with more digging I could find one that works well, but it would mean having to create a project, import the library in, and then exporting the bundle into Eclipse for processing.

The biggest interesting feature is how third party libraries are easily integrated into software you're writing. It's trivial to publish and retrieve the libraries other people have written, which is something I'd really enjoy being able to use.