[sdiy] Microcontrollers for eurorack use... What to use?

[rsdio at audiobanshee.com]

Olivier's advice is great. I'm a little torn about the advice to restrict yourself to text editor and command line tools for cross-platform development, though. On the one hand, it's incredibly useful to have all of these skills. Learning how to write C code that will compile and run on multiple platforms is a great way to really understand the language, and knowing how to use a text editor from the command line will probably get you out of trouble some where along the way.

On the other hand, I've never had a project where I needed to use anything outside the provided IDE and debugger. My advice here is to make sure that your custom boards always have the appropriate JTAG or other debugging hardware on board, so that your custom platform works with the vendor's IDE just like their evaluation platforms. In this way, I've always been able to debug my firmware on the actual hardware without any difficulty. It's incredibly rare that I need to write the code on a more common platform first, although I can see how that could be quite helpful in some situations.

Perhaps the difference between Olivier's projects and mine are that I'm always dealing with custom hardware that simply isn't available on any other platform, so I have to get my custom board running a.s.a.p., and having it work with the vendor's IDE is very helpful. Writing the same code for another platform wouldn't really work because the custom hardware isn't attached to the processor.

That said, I often use the command line for several pieces of the development process, and sometimes write custom tools on OSX or Unix to create files needed by the firmware.

By the way, I forgot to mention that Texas Instruments has a very interesting Tiva ARM line of processors that was formerly called Stellaris. I'm using the TM4C1294XL right now, and it looks quite promising. So add that to the list of processors I mentioned before.

Brian


On Sun, Jan 4, 2015 at 3:10 AM, Chris McDowell <declareupdate at gmail.com> wrote:
> Olivier, how would you suggest one get started with the STM32 chips? I’ve always stuck to what I could accomplish within the Arduino IDE, but would really love to “level up”. I bought one of the mbed-enabled nucleo dev boards from ST and really enjoy the extra horsepower, but I don’t want to rely on the mbed environment for developing any actual products. A nudge in the right direction would be much appreciated! :)