On 8/7/16 6:44 PM, Harvey White wrote:
I'm considering moving from an Atmel XMEGA environment to and ARM
environment. (various reasons, one being the purchase of Atmel by
Microchip and some corresponding price increases...)
I'm looking at the following scenario:
1) buying an explorer/development board: Nucleo 64 bit with a F446RET6
processor from STM. Seems to have the highest performance for
processor intensive solutions and would support daughterboards with
memory access (good for things like displays and extra memory).
2) I will probably (for these designs) go bare metal. The reasoning
is that I do not want Linux at the moment, and these are embedded
building blocks of larger systems. I already have an operating system
that needs to be rewritten (low level drivers only) for the ARM. It
already exists for the Xmega.... no, it's not FreeRtos. (there are
reasons).
2A) kinds of designs are display drivers mostly, which is where I need
the most processing power. May end up keeping the Xmega stuff for
smaller functions, that's not all that bad depending on what Microchip
does with the prices (already up some....)
3) Assuming that a 13 dollar development board will do well enough
(it's cheaper than I can make a board and populate it), and that there
are enough processor pins to run the daughter boards (which I don't
mind designing)...
4) What development tools are there that would work reasonably well?
I'd be using the (purchased with board) ST_link protocol.
5) cost IS an object, so I'd be looking for a free version that is NOT
code size limited. I've had Xmega projects at about 100K bytes of
code, which knocks out the "go see what it's like then pay us money"
approach of the major compiler vendors.
6) I'm hoping that people here with experience in ARM development have
some preferences and could help. The BBB is not a hardware candidate
for several reasons, one being cost (I tend to do distributed systems,
which means lots of processors), another of which is simply
complexity. A processor with add-ons (Arduino approach) seems to be a
minimalist hardware approach, which for now, is worth investigating.
Currently I am using the AVR studio IDE, and developing in either C or
C++, PC projects tend to be Lazarus Pascal for historical reasons and
the fact that Microsoft's .net framework drives me up a wall.
Comments welcome, and if this is sufficiently off topic for the group,
please reply directly. Also would like to hear about inexpensive
hardware development boards that might work. Considered the PSOC 5LP
boards, but they're such a loss leader that I wonder if they're going
to be permanent... Then again, everything changes.
Thanks
Harvey
Hi Harvey,
I routinely use low cost development boards for
specific application and attach them to either a
PC or one of low cost Linux board such as
Beagleboard or Raspberry. I also find they work
nicely in low cost test fixtures.
You haven't mentioned you development environment,
but for Windows you are probably already familiar
with the tools players and associated cost. I
settled on the Nucleo boards using OpenSTM32
running Linux since I am not a big Windows fan,
however they do offer a Windows version. The Linux
was a bit painful getting running, but it might be
a little easier on Windows. For some crazy reason
you have to register before you can even get to
the documentation which to me is the most
important part when researching development tools.
ST's CubeMx really helps in getting the low level
hardware code running without having to do a bunch
of custom work.
Also you might want to take a look at Mbed as
most if not all of the ST Nucleo board support it.
There is quite a bit of community code available
and it does not tie you to a single vendor. At one
time they only offered on-line development tools,
but may now have alternatives.
http://www.openstm32.org/HomePage
https://www.mbed.com/en/
Google has a wealth of information.
Good luck,
Mark
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