FYI: free STM8 compiler from Cosmic unlimited one year with tech support.

[Kjelt]

For those of you that might be interested and working with STM8's
ST has made a deal with Cosmic, which entails that you can now register at Cosmic for an unlimited one year version of the STM8 compiler and workbench.
http://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM147/CL1794/SC1807/SS1747/PF263328?ecmp=tt3446_gl_enews_mar2016&sp_rid=NjkwODIzOTM5NjcS1&sp_mid=12793171
http://cosmicsoftware.com/download_stm8_free.php

[Brutte]

IMHO that was too late. They have missed the low to middle volume market.
Now this part is flooded with dirt cheap Cortex M0's.

[true]

It's not really too late - STM8 is a neat architecture, and the chips are full of features not found at this price point. The 8-bitters are dying out to Cortex-M0, yes, but there is still a place for them, and I think STM8 beats out most of the competition here. Your "dirt cheap" Cortex-M0 are still significantly more expensive than an equivalently feature-specced STM8. There is quite some time yet before 8-bit dies for cost and practical reasons. But it will surely take a bunch of marketing before STM8 is seen more widely in use.

The C compilers aren't great for the architecture. Writing assembly for them is easy if one cares to.

The Cosmic stuff still requires registration, which sucks. Too bad SDCC is pretty poor except for the most trivial projects.

[dannyf]

I thought cosmic has already had this offering.

More of an iar user I don't find cosmic offers a good enough of a reason to switch. St visual developer studio is ancient.

[Kjelt]

No that was a 32kB limit now it is unlimited.
How much does the IAR cost?

[dannyf]

free (to me - somebody else is paying for it, ).

[dannyf]

Because of its homogeneity, all the stm8 cpus are the same from the compiler's perspective. So all you have to do is to get an older compiler (hopefully with an unlimited free license) and give it the latest header files and you are in business.

[3roomlab]

For those of you that might be interested and working with STM8's
ST has made a deal with Cosmic, which entails that you can now register at Cosmic for an unlimited one year version of the STM8 compiler and workbench.
http://www.st.com/web/catalog/tools/FM147/CL1794/SC1807/SS1747/PF263328?ecmp=tt3446_gl_enews_mar2016&sp_rid=NjkwODIzOTM5NjcS1&sp_mid=12793171
http://cosmicsoftware.com/download_stm8_free.php

Sorry for re-opening an old thread guys. But here goes my story/questions as i am truly curious about STM8L series. Specifically STM8L051/52 and L151/152.

From what I can understand, in the 20-32pin series of MCUs, these are the smallest + lowest power with 12 bit ADC capability? with ebay pricing under US$1.8 for L051 and US$3.9 for L151. Anybody knows of a better platform (ADC bit-wise, and super low power?) with comparable price?

So I went further, trying to acquire some bare MCU on a pinout PCB, and the 4wire type ST-link USB hoping to plug in and start to play, but I found some "glitches".

At my current level of understanding, I am faced with a few problems I hope STM MCU players can advise:
1) In terms of hardware interfacing, it seems that all STM8/32 require their ST-LINK? And they have so many flavors of it 1) small USB sticks, pink, grey, blue, etc 2) white large dongle 2 versions? There are also china versions "RISYM" types, they look like the small sticks, are these official and work?
2) Then there is only the STM8L discovery version from ST. I am hoping to skip this and go PC - DONGLE - 4wire - MCU, then I read about this post about compiler and went "oh shit", they don't give you the IDE to play? So how does 1 play software side - what do industry pro use? and what do/should hobbyist use?

(edit : I understand that CHINA has flooded some DG series and so there should be some fake STM clones, will this be a problem like the FTDI bricking crap? or there is no such thing as STM fakes?)

thanks for any replies

[ebclr]

We have a brave guy resisting on 8 bit arena

50 MIPS 8051 CPU
8 kB Flash memory
768 B RAM
24 or 16-bit ADC with up to 1 ksps
Two 8-bit DACs
Comparator
Voltage reference
Temperature sensor
Four 16-bit timers
Three PCA channels
Seventeen digital I/O

http://www.silabs.com/products/mcu/8-bit/c8051f35x/pages/c8051f35x.aspx

[Kjelt]

At my current level of understanding, I am faced with a few problems I hope STM MCU players can advise:
1) In terms of hardware interfacing, it seems that all STM8/32 require their ST-LINK? And they have so many flavors of it 1) small USB sticks, pink, grey, blue, etc 2) white large dongle 2 versions? There are also china versions "RISYM" types, they look like the small sticks, are these official and work?
2) Then there is only the STM8L discovery version from ST. I am hoping to skip this and go PC - DONGLE - 4wire - MCU, then I read about this post about compiler and went "oh shit", they don't give you the IDE to play? So how does 1 play software side - what do industry pro use? and what do/should hobbyist use?

I would recommend to Buy the official ST Link2 or alternative the Rlink from Raisonance they have always worked for me personal and professionally and are cheap compared to the programmers for Arm for instance like the Keil or Segger, so no need to buy clones or other manufacturers.
If you want to program and debug on target make sure not to use the Swim pin in your design, only use it for programming debugging that makes life much easier.
For the IDE to start you can use STs STMVD (STM8s IDE) although not the best or fastest it works directly with Cosmic and will get you going. Also this was used professionally for many years until switched to IAR which might be better but costs a lot of money (i believe around €1500) for non commercial use. The othe route is totally free.
Good luck and if you,re stuck just ask.

[wraper]

http://www.silabs.com/products/mcu/8-bit/c8051f35x/pages/c8051f35x.aspx

New EFM8 series from Silicon Labs are significantly cheaper than older C8051x.

[dannyf]

1) In terms of hardware interfacing, it seems that all STM8/32 require their ST-LINK?

STM32 can be programmed with a jlink or other programmers. STM8 cannot.

Some variants of both can be programmed through a bootloader.

STLink can program both.

Lots of Chinese st-link clones and they all work. Some can be even reprogrammed to be a jlink - ob.

2) Then there is only the STM8L discovery version from ST. I am hoping to skip this and go PC - DONGLE - 4wire - MCU, then I read about this post about compiler and went "oh shit", they don't give you the IDE to play? So how does 1 play software side - what do industry pro use? and what do/should hobbyist use?

They are STM8S discovery, the board that started them all - technically Luminary may have started it but STM8S-Discovery is the first that got lots of people interested.

(edit : I understand that CHINA has flooded some DG series and so there should be some fake STM clones, will this be a problem like the FTDI bricking crap? or there is no such thing as STM fakes?)

The GD32F103 can use the STM32F103 header file, so code compiled for the STM32F103 runs on GD32F103 - they are some exceptions due to a couple hardware differences (like oscillator settings) so the other way may not work.

Hardware wise, the GD chip is quite amazing and intriguing. It actually has a huge onboard ram buffer due to its use of a serial flash. That creates some interesting problems, like excessive time / cycles needed to fetch out-of-buffer items from the flash. So GD's spec is both true and false, depending whether the flash cache contains the desired instructions.