stm32f4-discovery toolchain help

[Gabri74]

Regarding the STM32 Cube / old low-level library debate, I've talked with a friend which works in ST and told me
they hate it as strong as is possible.
It was needed to compete in the arduino/newbies market and was basically forced down their throats my marketing.
The received a lot of complaints from professional developers and company about it being bloated, slow and awful.
Being used to the old fast and bare-metal library I can't stand it. Several K lines of code to get a timer running.. WTF !?!?

But....

he said to me that a new low-level library for experienced developers is being developed and it will be
release soon.. fingers-crossed ;-)

[Gabri74]

See also really good suggestions by newbrain here:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/best-ide-for-stm32f7-discovery-board/

[bigdawg]

Regarding the STM32 Cube / old low-level library debate, I've talked with a friend which works in ST and told me
they hate it as strong as is possible.
It was needed to compete in the arduino/newbies market and was basically forced down their throats my marketing.
The received a lot of complaints from professional developers and company about it being bloated, slow and awful.
Being used to the old fast and bare-metal library I can't stand it. Several K lines of code to get a timer running.. WTF !?!?

But....

he said to me that a new low-level library for experienced developers is being developed and it will be
release soon.. fingers-crossed ;-)

This is so weird though because as a "newbie", I think their STMcube implementation is atrocious to say the least. I am not really a fanboy for atmel/TI/NXP but I have worked with boards from each of those companies and trust me, all three of them had better implementation software-wise than STM. If novices like me dont like ST libraries, the pros here dont seem to like it too, than who the heck likes it 

[Muxr]

Don't get it either. They could have just added some support to https://github.com/rogerclarkmelbourne/Arduino_STM32 and stuck with libs for professional work. It would have been easier and it would have been a better PR move for the Maker community.

[MT]

Gabri74 link=topic=27880.msg749871#msg749871 date=1441730116]
Regarding the STM32 Cube / old low-level library debate, I've talked with a friend
which works in ST and told me they hate it as strong as is possible.

Not strongly enough!

It was needed to compete in the arduino/newbies market and was basically
forced down their throats my marketing.

It's interesting to note that marketing ""have concerns about newbies" something
that is completely missing at ST's own forum and pushed that responsability onto a few
individuals like clive 1 for instance!

The received a lot of complaints from professional developers and company about it being bloated,
slow and awful. Being used to the old fast and bare-metal library I can't stand it. Several K lines
of code to get a timer running.. WTF !?!?

It would have been interessting to know when in time they recieved the complaints becuse as it
seams ST have made wrong for years upon years!

But....
he said to me that a new low-level library for experienced developers is
being developed and it will be release soon.. fingers-crossed ;-)

Well, that's really some eyebrowe lifting things you relaying to us ST users, so what does that
actually mean? HAL and SPL completely usless for pros and therefore amied at newbies? And
likewise direct register programming for pros only?

Im a dinosaur but i dont want yet another fucked up abstraction library, i want ST to take their sorry
thumbs out of their sorry arses and manufacture a PLAIN, CLEAN non fragmented without missing
definitions, register definition file for each and every device they manufacture and leave all the library
writing to the users! I want ST to STOP bullying people into the mentality of their MINDS!

Tell your friend at ST that i have a standing order for him to go upstairs and kick the managment
butt's and i will buy him a dinner when done...

[Gabri74]

Tell your friend at ST that i have a standing order for him to go upstairs and kick the managment
butt's and i will buy him a dinner when done...

I'll do it for sure       

[westfw]

They could have just added some support to https://github.com/rogerclarkmelbourne/Arduino_STM32

Um, "Arduino STM32" is quite new (about a year people first started noticing the cheap "Maple" clones, and looked at updating the abandoned Maple code, and maybe sixs months worth of "complete and usable".)  This means it wasn't around at all when CUBE was first being developed.

I hadn't noticed that Cube looked "beginner friendly"; it has many of the same failings as ST's previous (and also "pretty awful") "Standard Peripheral Library."  (IIRC, the original Maple project tried to put Arduino compatibility on top of the ST SPL, and ended up having to give up and start from scratch.)  (alas, other vendors' similar products (Atmel ASF) are similarly awful in similar ways.  And it does look like a poor implementation of a bad set of requirements, but I don't think "as easy to use as Arduino" was among those requirements.  I'm betting "mumble MISRA.  Mumble No Preprocessor complexity.  Mumble C99, no proprietary compiler extensions, no viral libraries.  mumble any known starting state.  works across entire product line from 4k CM0+ to 2MB CM7.)

"Marketing made us and we hate it too" is a lousy excuse.  Please give me "we're trying as hard as we can, and we think we came up with a pretty good solution, and here's why it's good..."

[Neganur]

Yesterday, I used cube for the first time ever.

My experience in how to use it was:
Select the target
Select the tool chain you want to export to
Set up the pins and modules you plan to use
Configure them
Check the function block map for red fields
Build (or was it generate)
Export (tool chain of choice opens with code)
Fill in the gaps marked as user code.
Build
Download into the target.

I had the feeling this was pretty OK, but I had someone who was instructing me. It probably takes a while to learn how to use the tool.

What I liked very much was the way the tool offers an overview/parametric selection of your target down to the very tiniest feature. This is incredibly helpful for HW design tasks where you have to look for e.g. an ST Cortex 4 with CAN and low power. Plug in the check marks and you get a list of targets to choose from.

The reason why I'd like to recommend trying cube just to try the selection feature is that the alternative really sucks. Parametric search on digikey and copy paste features into a spreadsheet to compare and select something took me a lot longer.

[MT]

No you dont need Cube, you dont want to need cube , i use it only for pin mapping then take screen dumps using these for references during development. One issue with emblocks/embitz, cooide etc is if they support the part you selected to use
if not you have various degrees of problems. I can gladly recomend EB.

So far even when the particular model isn't supported you can usually get away with the approximate. They have a major version for each line from what I can tell. For instance I am using a F070 chip currently, but the closest they have is support for F071. So I've been using the setup for F071, since 071 has more features than the 070 I am using I just have to be careful not to use registers that aren't supported on 070. Haven't ran into any issues yet, but I could go in and manually modify all the project files to match if need be.

Some aproximations simply dont work even when devices is within the same family, just faffing around the
project files is not enough, sometimes a stlinkgdb tweeak is needed, or a change in the scripts, whatever
which has been the case numerous times before. It all boils down to what ST does and dont do!

[westfw]

other vendors' similar products are similarly awful in similar ways.

To be fair, it is REALLY DIFFICULT to maintain "simple" access to a very large feature set.  With something like Arduino, you get a nice but extremely simplified API that implements a very small subset of the features of whichever processor you happen to be using.  With something like Cube or ASF, you want to expose all of the features of the chip, and you've pretty much pissed off most of your potential users by the time you implement an abstracted data structure that has room for all of the features of a peripheral.  (pinMode(INPUT|OUTPUT) is swell.  pinMode(direction, pullup, pulldown, input buffer enable, drive strength, ...) - not so swell.  Yes, configuring the pins in a GUI is nice, but having the resulting code call the fully general init function is pretty frustrating.

[Psi]

The idea behind cube is awesome.
An app you can use to graphically set all the features/pinouts you want with lots of explanations about how they work.

But it needs to generate discrete blocks the user can cut paste into their code and it needs to be very close to bit level. I don't mind a little standard library stuff, but only a little. I need to be able to see what it's doing

[Bassman59]

The idea behind cube is awesome.
An app you can use to graphically set all the features/pinouts you want with lots of explanations about how they work.

But it needs to generate discrete blocks the user can cut paste into their code and it needs to be very close to bit level. I don't mind a little standard library stuff, but only a little. I need to be able to see what it's doing

In other words, they (and Atmel, and NXP, and ...) need to do what Silicon Labs does.