[sdiy] Microcontrollers, development environments and hardware programmer recommendations.

[Jay Schwichtenberg]

I do what is called 'bare metal programming' (embedded programming) for work and all the systems I've worked on in the last couple of years are ARM chips from STMicro and NXP.

 

I use to do all my designs with the MicroChip parts. Now I use ARM chips. I think the MicroChip parts are more suited for things like sensor controllers or system nodes and ARM chips are more real computers (they scale from tiny to real computers). So it depends on what you are doing which route you go. A lot of people are using the STMicro ARM chips in their design. Other popular items are the Teensy (FreeScale/NXP ARM chips) and the Arduino chips. I view the Arduino boards/chips as more like the MicroChip parts, good for dedicated IO or as a system node.

 

So I would look at the STMicro DISCO and NUCLEO development boards and get a tool chain or development environment that works for you going. STMicro has an online development environment called MBED, there are flavors of Eclipse that work with ARM chips and GCC if you like to work from a console. One thing nice about the DISCO and NUCLEO boards is that they have programmers built into the boards so you don't need that.

 

Another pieces of software that a lot of chip manufactures have now is  something to configure the chip and IO libraries to support that. So this application will generate initialization code for the clocking, peripheral and interrupts so you don't have to spend hours with the data sheets figuring out the bits needed to configure the chips. For FreeScale/NXP call this Processor Expert.

 

Good luck.

 

 

From: Synth-diy [mailto:synth-diy-bounces at dropmix.xs4all.nl] On Behalf Of john slee
Sent: Saturday, October 22, 2016 6:54 AM
To: Gordonjcp
Cc: Synth DIY
Subject: Re: [sdiy] Microcontrollers, development environments and hardware programmer recommendations.

 

On 23 October 2016 at 00:20, Gordonjcp <gordonjcp at gjcp.net> wrote:

You can get an STM32F103


If it's for audio stuff... STM32F411E-DISCO has a DAC+amplifier with a 3.5mm jack attached, and a few other goodies, like a gyro that you could creatively use in lieu of hooking up pots :-)

 

http://au.mouser.com/new/stmicroelectronics/stm-stm32f411e-disco/

 

And of course it is also an ST-LINK interface. Seems like pretty good value to me.

 

John

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