Has anyone tried connecting the Spark to an mbed?
ie use Spark to take care of the web connection but use the mbed for controlling a display, etc accordingly?
Alright but basically, it’s kinda the same.
In general, A microcontroller (spark core, arduino, pic, ti) needs an IDE to program.
So mbed is the IDE but works with various microcontroller. The spark core can probably work there but porting the entire code over is tedious and not worthwhile.
What’s exactly that you require? 
kennethlimcp, MBED is a platform that makes specific use of ARM Cortex Mx processors, similar to Spark. Their toolchain is based on armc c/c++ and they have an SDK. However, I believe their core includes networking and an RTOS (real time operating system). They too have a web-based IDE!
If I understand correctly, spongefile wants to connect an mbed board to a Spark. Spongefile, you could do that with I2C or serial. Using I2C creates a “slave” (the Spark?) and a “master” (mbed?) device. The master sends messages to the slave and also polls it to see if the slave has a message for it. Using serial would be similar without the good protocol management of I2C. It all depends on what you want to do. 
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At the moment, the mbed has a bunch of well documented libraries that work with components I’d like to use that either don’t exist for the Spark yet, or (I think) require something more powerful than the Spark.
On the other hand, if I want to connect the mbed board to the web, I have to mess with connection stuff that the Spark makes much, much easier.
So if the Spark can send data via serial or I2C to the mbed, I could theoretically use the strengths of both.
For example, one of the things I’d like to mess with is right now is displaying some web info on an e-paper screen like this one: http://www.embeddedartists.com/products/displays/lcd_27_epaper.php. AFAIK, that’s not possible on the Spark yet, although @timb may be working on it. In this scenario the Spark would get some info from an API, send it to the mbed, and the mbed would handle how to display that info.
I’m just learning how serial and I2C work though, any good descriptions/tutorials on the subject?
spongefile, sparkfun has this tutorial which could help. You can also ask from help on the forum! There was a topic on how to connect a Spark to an arduino so it may also help.
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