additional 8bit SRAM (parallel/serial)

[paulie]

EXACTLY, like me speaking in a mirror. LOL.

Thanks for the hint on the Yiu book. I just downloaded the PDF and it's absolutely the best deal for these chips so far. Definitely definitive.

[Yansi]

And do no not miss one  - there are maybe four such books I think. There is also one dedicated for Cortex M0 only and one revised edition, which added Cortex M4.

[paulie]

After playing with over two dozen different ARM chips recently I must admit to not being that excited by F0 or F4. IMO better to leave those for "ghetto" discussion. Only STM32f103c8t6 has impressed me among all the ARMs. More features and performance per buck than any other chip (including AVR and PIC). Also easiest to obtain and most popular ARM in the world therefor lots of support.

The only other device of interest to me lately is the STM8 series because it's literally the lowest cost MCU with even vaguely similar capabilities. Actually lowest cost PERIOD! Also very common and easy to buy.

The dynamic duo.

[Yansi]

For me the price of STM32 does not matter much for obvious reasons. 103C8 is too small for many my applications, in the name of pin count. I am bulding some experimental BLDC controller board now, and there is almost fully assigned 64pin package. And that is not  the biggest wiring project at all.  I also play a little with logic gate arrays and when it comes to connecting big memories (to PLDs or ARMs) or TFT screens, 100pin package is nothing and sometimes 144pin is also small.
Said thing is, one can't have sufficient time to play with all these amazing gizmos... so the progress at diy side is slow and low. I haven't made anything much interesting, for the last half year. Only many unfinished work lies on the desk. Hope next year will be much better.

I promise, when I'll have something interesting, I'll share. Maybe the motor controller board, or some stuff around electrophorescent display, which I am working on exactly now. (Routing adaptor board for 32L152 discovery board).

[westfw]

More features and performance per buck than any other chip (including AVR and PIC). Also easiest to obtain and most popular ARM in the world therefor lots of support.

Transient qualities?   For instance, the F1xx chip are NOT supported by ST's recent "STCube" initialization code generator.  And TI pretty much dumped their whole CM3 line.  Perhaps there is something fundamentally broken about CM3 that is causing manufacturers to move on to other things.

[Yansi]

Will be, end of year. Not broken, but old series, noone bothers. There is quite good StdPeriph library to be used. Cube sucks, sucks like a bitch, unusable to any serious work (motor control, low power). To be exact - HAL libraries sucks. Good only for some basic pin toggling arduino style. The config tool has good concept and would be very nice to have such tool for StdPeriph libraries.  Unhappily, StdPeriph is no longer supported on new series of STM32 MCUs. That really pisses off a lot of people. (possibility of continuing StdPeriph still considered, chances low).

Let's go to bed now, 4:21 AM here 

[westfw]

The new HAL replaced SPL?  I hadn't realized that; what I've used so far looked like Cube WAS generating calls to SPL, or that the HAL they were talking about included SPL...

(Of course, I've said elsewhere that I think the SPL is pretty bad, too...)

[paulie]

Will be, end of year.

Are you saying ST will discontinue production of STM32F103? If this is the case I'm going to drop all this ARM crap right now and crawl back to 8 bit world. They can leave somebody else twisting in the wind. At least Microchip PIC16x54 and ATMEL m8 and t2313 still available 20 years after intro.

What about STM8S003?

[Yansi]

nono, that was for the F1 Cube. I think end of the yr is the date for F1_Cube publishing.
F103 is not to be discontinued in any near future.

That ST8 sucker - I dont know, if anything is about to be changed. So, the answer is - everything normal :-)

[paulie]

WHEW! I keep thinking these chips are too good to be true and waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I could care less about product support or Cube/SPL/HAL (Sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do asm). You and the other Human Centipedes can crawl around on hands and knees and worry about that stuff. Real Men build $1 demo boards and create their own include files from datasheets.

Back to regularly scheduled program.