Dev tool pricing

[mpbrock]

So I’ve always been a heavy Microchip user (ICD2/3, PicKits etc) been looking recently at the ICD4/real ice.

Now I’ve started looking about and found that for STM8s you can purchase a programmer / debugger genuine for about £16. Why are the Microchip tools 20x the price of ST tools? Makes me wonder why I should carry on using PICs in designs when the tools are cheaper and the MCUs are cheaper for ST. Are the ST tools as good as the Microchip ones for debugging? The stlink seems too cheap somehow.

[oPossum]

MPLAB Snap $15

https://www.microchip.com/developmenttools/ProductDetails/PartNO/PG164100

[TerminalJack505]

MPLAB Snap $15

https://www.microchip.com/developmenttools/ProductDetails/PartNO/PG164100

I was on Microchip's site yesterday and I clicked on a dead link and it brought up a page that offers a 50% off coupon code ('404Discount') for the MPLAB Snap.  So if anyone is interested in getting one then they might try that link.

[SiliconWizard]

I guess it's mainly due (at least initially) to the fact that Microchip MCUs didn't embed standard JTAG interfaces until relatively recently (I think that started with the PIC32? and even so, PIC32s still have a custom ICD interface outside of JTAG.)

So different MCUs would have kinda different protocols that would evolve over time. That made supporting all of them painful and expensive. JTAG, OTOH, is standard and easy to implement.

Now as oPossum said there is the MPLAB Snap. I haven't looked at how many different MCUs it supports though, does it support all of them?

And apart from technical considerations, there's also the positioning the company chooses for development tools. Microchip's compilers, for instance, are relatively expensive in the PRO version. The free versions are crippled (although perfectly usable). Other vendors make their compilers 100% free. It's all a marketing choice. Ask Microchip directly for more direct answers.

[oPossum]

Device list for all current programmer/debugger: http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/Device_Support.pdf

[andersm]

Microchip in particular have never seemed very interested in selling tools at a loss, or even at cost.

[fcb]

I've got an ICD4 (but mainly use the ICD3) - there is a teardown of the ICD4 somewhere (Mike or Dave did it), it's quite complex.

[mpbrock]

The snap looks rather limiting compared to say an icd or real ice. I’m not sure how “powerful” a stlink actually is - is it comparable to a Segger J-Link if I was debugging an Arm for example? Unlimited breakpoints, conditional breakpoints - the good stuff you get with a decent debugging tool (e.g ICD3). If not does anyone know of a decent STM8 debugger that’s on par with a JLink or ICD3?

Thanks

[fcb]

Microchip in particular have never seemed very interested in selling tools at a loss, or even at cost.

It's worked for them so far.  Microchips dev tools are not expensive in the grand scale of things.

Even back in the day when you had bond-out emulators, their stuff was fairly priced compared to some of the competition.

There has always been a cheap option - burn and learn with windowed PIC54/56/57's using a blacklight tube and John's (I forget his surname he was nr Leeds, UK -  Mike will probably know) <£100 programmer (it was a little PCB with a ZIF), then RF Solutions did a low cost version bond-out emulator and headers if you didn't want to stump up for the Microchip ICE. Ended up with all these (including the pucker Microchip ICE, with a PCMCIA adaptor made by WhiteWingLogic (Mike!)).

About 2 years ago I did a project based on an Arduino ATMEL - we had huge problems with the tools until we stumped up for an ATATAMEL-ICE (£110). Certainly wouldn't start an ARM project without a decent JLink.

[andersm]

I’m not sure how “powerful” a stlink actually is - is it comparable to a Segger J-Link if I was debugging an Arm for example? Unlimited breakpoints, conditional breakpoints - the good stuff you get with a decent debugging tool (e.g ICD3).

The ST-Link/v2 at least is a "dumb" adapter compared to a J-Link, so it pretty much depends on the debugger you're using it with. I don't remember if GDB+OpenOCD supports unlimited breakpoints (ie. patching breakpoints into flash), or if it's limited to the hardware breakpoints. Conditional breakpoints, sure. The v2 is fairly slow, but the new v3 should be faster.

[mpbrock]

Maybe that’s the big difference - a Microchip real ice is doing all the grunt work watching registers etc in real-time vs a dumb stlink that probably only sends back the register states when the micro is halted?

[andersm]

The RealICE can capture data streams generated by the device, but (AFAIK) it's just a passive listener. "Smart" adapters like the J-Link, or Black Magic Probe implement parts of the protocols and algorithms inside the adapter itself, so they are not as limited by USB speeds and latencies.

[SiliconWizard]

Really cheap tools only really matter to hobbyists. For professional use, you don't really care much if you have to shell out $200 instead of $20.

So making dev tools cheap can have benefits for enlarging the hobbyist user base - but does Microchip need that? I don't think so. For many years, they actually suffered from an image of "hobby microcontrollers" (that was 15-20 years ago) and needed to work their way up to get a better image in the professional world.

This has been discussed before, but making access easier to hobbyists is a double-edged sword that can have annoying consequences and may have only a marginal benefit.
And to be fair to Microchip, they were among the rare vendors that sold MCUs that hobbyists could easily use for cheap at the time. The market is now submerged with low-cost ARM-Cortex offering (along with low-cost tools), but that's only been for a few years (5 to 10 I' say). Before that, nobody was expecting to get a programming probe for $15 or so.

[Nominal Animal]

To be fair to Microchip, their development tool chain is centered around a hobbled-down GCC port.

I don't mind paying well for good tools. (Granted, as I am a hobbyist, I am using free/open source tools with microcontrollers; but when I did run an IT company, I did unhesitatingly plonk down thousands of bucks at a time for software licenses for good tools, not to mention proper hardware, even though I was in my twenties and early thirties at the time.  I knew even then, from experience, that it is worth the investment.)

The issue I've seen is that most of the professional software development tools are really not that good.  The compilers do tend to be pretty good (and GCC in particular isn't excellent, just good enough), but the hardware abstraction and other libraries seem hell bent on keeping you within that specific ecosystem and never porting your code anywhere else.  This is because that is in their interests to do so.  To keep me buying new licenses, they need to keep pushing out New and Improved! versions, and keep maintenance costs of older versions as low as possible.  Every bug they fix or not, is internally a value-cost proposition: how will this affect the profits from the software side?

On the positive side, these companies do not seem to be as short-sighted as pure software companies are.  I guess that is because of the hardware guarantees of availability, and in general, longer-term projects than in the pure software world.

[Kerlin]

Didn't users report a problem with the USB connectors on the Snap doing just that, snapping off the board.
Any one remember if is the Snap or the Atmel-ICE ?

[JPortici]

FYI, the PICKIT4 is at least as good as an ICD3 in terms of programming and debugging speed, provided you use external power for programming. It's WAY faster for devices like the PIC32MM, dsPIC in general, most PIC except for the K42 and K83 series (but i bet it's a programming script issue)
There is currently an hardware issue with The PK4 that generates overvoltages in the MCLR line if the PK4 is also providing power to the target. The issue can be solved by putting a 100R resistor in series with the MCLR line...

[MarkR42]

At least the Atmel attiny1-series, have some *very* reasonably priced dev boards. The Atmel studio (although win64-only) is free of charge to use.

Look at the the attiny xplained 416 nano - I think that's the one I got - it was less than GBP 10 delivered and contains a built-in programmer, can do source-level debugging etc. There are boards for other chips in the 8-bit series and they're not much more expensive.