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panky

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Joined: 02/10/2012
Location: Australia
Posts: 1114

Posted: 09:36am 07 Jul 2018

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Peter,

It seems like there are 2 (although overlapping) camps - the Microcontrollers who need a relatively simple and straightforward platform to actually do some usefull things and the hobbyist/adventurers who love speed, features, are terrified by "C" and in many cases (eg. mine) are true hobbyist/tinkers ( and often, retirees). We (I) just dream of building a "bigger, better mousetrap" and all the fun that involves.☺☺☺☺☺

I would love to see the STM come to fruition if you have the time and interest to do so. I have ordered my Nucleo and can't wait to fire it up and assist with testing etc.

I suspect that most of the STM users will come from the second (and I imagine, much smaller) group but hopefully that won't deter you.

Regards,
Doug.

... almost all of the Maximites, the MicromMites, the MM Extremes, the ArmMites, the PicoMite and loving it!

geeken
Newbie

Joined: 13/01/2018
Location: United States
Posts: 20

Posted: 10:16am 07 Jul 2018

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matherp said Thanks all for the interesting input - lots to think about. Current status is that the Armmite H7 port is nearing MMX functionality (other than VGA) but is considerably faster and with more memory. It seems to be very stable and I've run the very processor, memory, and I/O intensive sprite demo for hours without any issue.

What is definitely the case is that the STM development environment is miles ahead of Microchip. STM32CubeMX sets up the peripherals for you and then this code can be easily incorporated into the development. Migrating from SPI based SD card support to 4-bit parallel took just a day, whereas I'm not aware anyone has ever got 4-bit support to work on any of the PICs - certainly the documentation is horrendous and impenetrable. What I particularly like about the STM environment is that the generated code includes lots of pairs of comments like:

/* USER CODE BEGIN WHILE */
while (1)
{

/* USER CODE END WHILE */

As long as you put your code between these brackets in the auto-generated files then CubeMX will leave your code intact but update the system code as you make changes to the configuration. This means that you can add peripherals very easily. (4 serial ports added today)

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Hi Peter

To me, the Armmite project is a game changer in many ways, as the H7 is so capable and fast. It is an expensive chip ($24 one off?) and so it will be most useful for price-irrelevant development projects & high end projects / products.

I see that a new revision of the chip just came out and it looks like ST are trying for a "zero-errata" situation, with this chip. Also the Nucleo has a v2 coming out soon, so that will be interesting to see - it may have a switch-mode regulator on there to increase battery life, etc.

From a chip-price point of view, the PIC32MZ does remain very relevant in many cases, as its only about 1/3 the price of the ST H7 chip.

Have the impression that the ST H7 is going to dominate in the future.

This chip is the ultimate mid-range real time controller as it has up 240 pins, etc and is fast enough, with many inbuilt modules such as an HRTIM timer module, to manage them all, for many projects.

If this is going to be the outcome for the H7 in the market, how possible is it to have the option to compile the ARMMITE BASIC code into an executable, once development with the interpreter is successful ? That would really make this a valuable setup and I would invest in a compiler like that !

Cheers
Thanks for all of the valuable work on the Armmite :)
Ken

PS : The H7 Nucleo is an interesting controller in that it is the same price as the chip itself.

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