[sdiy] Most common ICs

[nvawter]

On 2015-09-19 11:56, Pete Hartman wrote:
> This must be a personal taste thing, as I have no problems at all
> programming with PICs.  The documentation is very good, and there are
> lots of examples to get over the most difficult part which is how to
> set the various switches (in AVR world the equivalent is the
> "fuses").  I've actually had more frustration figuring out how to set
> fuses, to be honest.  I haven't played with the STM32s, I'll
> certainly have to give that a try.

The STM32s are quite epic, but one or two things on them are as 
painstaking as fuses.
Just to help out anyone who might be curious, in my experience, 
configuring ARMs
has a few extra step most previous CPUs don't have:

1. You must configure the clock tree AND enable the clock to each 
peripheral AND
configure the GPIO, including In/out, speed AND in some cases 
impedance/drive strength AND in some cases
configure the routing of your peripheral to the proper GPIO.  Addly, 
these devices have
optional DMA on many peripherals which adds an extra layer.

None of this is *difficult*, it just seems wrong because experienced 
people find it hard to believe that so
many individual steps are necessary.  Each step is completely logical 
though and makes the chips extremely powerful
and flexible.  Once you get them going, particularly DMA-driven ADCs, 
you'll think to yourself, wow,
this is exactly what was needed.

If you have questions about stm32f4 chips or similar ones, I warehouse a 
lot of information at diydsp.com/livesite/stm32f4
and you can ask questions on the subreddit I created: 
https://www.reddit.com/r/stm32f4/  (600 subscribers!)

Possibly your best boards for experimenting with the STM32F4 vis-a-vis 
music are the Axoloti, Teensy 3.1
and STM32f4 discovery.  The Axoloti has everything done for you: just 
design synths in the GUI, mix in
your C code, upload(!!!) and plug in MIDI cables.  The Teensy is easy 
b/c Arduino/processing is ported to
it, but it has no FPU, but there is a tiny 16-bit audio codec board for 
it :(   and the Discovery is
very cheap and has minimal peripherals including a 24-bit codec.  Lots 
of synth hackers got started on it,
I made a video playlist on youtube of them:  
https://www.youtube.com/user/DIYDSP

-Noah/DIYDSP