[sdiy] STM32 F0 (Cortex M0) Microcontrollers

[James Patchell]

Hey All...

     Last week, my wife and I took a trip down to San Diego.  There is a 
Hotel we like to stay in there that is within walking distance of the 
Amtrak Station.

     The first day there, my wife went to the Fashion Valley Mall, and I 
went up to La Jolla to attend the ST Microelectronics seminar for their 
new STM32F0 (which is an ARM Cotex M0 micro controller).  This is also 
significant since this is the first Seminar I have attended since I lost 
most of my eyesight.  The speakers did a fairly good job of presenting 
the material.  It was a little tough for me as the main presenter had a 
bit of a french accent, but he really knew the product well.

     And best of all, I walked away with an STM32F0 discovery kit 
(retail value about $29) and the evaluation dev software installed on my 
laptop.

     The cool thing about the discovery kit is that the board comes with 
a programmer/debugger on board (implemented in a Cotex M3 of all things) 
that connects via USB.  And, all of the pins on the Cortex M0 are 
brought out to two single inline pin headers so that the board can be 
mounted in a standard solderless proto board or in a standard perf 
board.  (Or maybe even a PCB).

     The software that you get is an IDE for writing C and Asm code.  
And it will also debug up to 32K of code.

     Anyway, pretty cool.  I am thinking of using one of these discovery 
boards in my next synth project.

     -Jim