Free Launchpad boards from TI (Offer ended)

[dannyf]

On balance, I would think the ST library is good. Well documented, and good naming convention and easy to use as well. They don't have as many examples to get people started, however. ST's hardware also has a lot of resources but aren't as rich as TI's - rather than having identical well-featured peripherals, they have multiple timers each with slightly different twist.

NXP, like TI, also has good hardware and a long history. Their chips, however, are not as feature rich as TI's.

The luminary library was actually good for its time but it is becoming a baggage for TI now, in my view.

[Stonent]

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/free-st-discovery-board/

[Harvs]

On balance, I would think the ST library is good. Well documented, and good naming convention and easy to use as well.

I guess we can agree to disagree on that one.  Yes, they're a lot better than say the AVR32 software framework (or at least use to be.)  But there's still too many things missing that aren't documented.  E.g. grab any one of their example projects, build it with hard abi, declare a float and you'll be straight into the hard fault handler.  They could have at least put a commented code section in there to enable the FPU.

[dannyf]

Well, if you tell the code to use a hardware peripheral and you don't enable that peripheral, bad things are bound to happen.

It is probably not reasonable to expect the people who wrote the library to be responsible for that.

[Harvs]

No that's not the point.  The solution to the problem is to open the provided startup file and put the following code segment at the start of the systeminit function.

Code: [Select]

/* FPU settings ------------------------------------------------------------*/
  #if (__FPU_PRESENT == 1) && (__FPU_USED == 1)
    SCB->CPACR |= ((3UL << 10*2)|(3UL << 11*2));  /* set CP10 and CP11 Full Access */
  #endif

Then you can just forget about it.  That would have saved multiple dozens of posts on the ST forum of people trying to track down a seemingly unrelated hard fault.

Anyway, there's many other examples. Not the least of which is their libraries to "allow easy portability across the device range," so they thought it would be a good idea to randomly change some of the naming conventions between the M0 and M4 libraries, awesome idea.

End story is it seems none have taken the library issue that seriously.  It's a shame, since all they'd have to do is have the developers monitor their own forum and make changes through the revisions to reduce the common problems people are having, like the FPU.

[elcomtel]

I just scored myself a $24.00 MSP430 USB Stick Development Tool for free.   
See: http://www.ti.com/tool/ez430-f2013

I can recommend anyone else to give it a go. Free for the taking.

Five days later a FedEx shipment arrives from Texas Instruments.
Very fine outcome indeed.

[Crazy Ape]

Indeed, my boards arrived today also (Melbourne / Aus).