MCU peripherals

[lamanna]

Hi all,
A while back I decided to get into MCU development. I'm a Comp Sci. guy but I've always been interested in electronics... I figured a MCU was the best first step into exploring the electronic side of things. Due to the relatively low price of development boards... I went a bit crazy and bought a few different ones. I've ended up with:

• Arduino
• MSP430
• Tiva TM4c123G (previously Stellaris LM4F120)
• STM32F4 Discovery
• Raspberry Pi
• Papilio 250 (Xilinx FPGA... more of a longer term thing after MCUs)

I've had a play with each and I'd have to the say the TI products are coming out ahead purely because of the highly modified Eclipse IDE. I used CoIDE for the STM32 but found they went to great effort to restrict me from modify my damn GUI... it bothers me that I have to hack config files in order to get a non-white background in the GUI (first world problem ). I still haven't settled on anyone yet but I'm leaning towards the Stellaris or STM32 because they use the Cortex M4 chip. No particular reason for that other than it's less restrictive with RAM and Flash storage and it's not a full blown PC like the Pi is.

Going forward, I want to start interfacing with more complicated devices like LCD screens and Wireless/GSM/Bluetooth peripherals. The problem is, it looks like I can't just buy something generic and plug it into any one of my devices and have it work. There's the wireless shields for Arduino, a base board with ethernet and other things for the STM32 and a Wireless BoosterPack CC3000 for the Stellaris. They're each around $50 which is a bit expensive to buy for all my MCUs.

My options are to either pick a MCU and buy peripherals just for that or look for more generic solutions where 1 device fits all. Do such peripherals even exist? They don't need to be able to slot on nicely to the dev board like the arduino shields do... I can take care of connecting everything with wires and a breadboard if it doesn't fit. I don't have a specific project that needs certain requirements other than I want to connect to the MCU over some kind of network protocol to test a few ideas I've got.

To cut a long story short. Are there common peripherals like Wireless chips, bluetooth, ethernet, etc... that work with most MCUs (driver support and anything else needed) so I don't have to buy one per MCU I own?


Thanks for reading!

[ElektroQuark]

• Stellaris LM4F120 (previously Tiva TM4c123G)

Tiva TM4c123G (previously Stellaris LM4F120)

[alm]

Many Cortex M4s already contain an ethernet MAC, so the only thing you'd need would be a PHY and a magjack. Or alternatively a MAC+PHY like the ENC28J60 if you don't care about performance. Pretty sure you can find breakout boards for both on eBay. In general there is nothing MCU-specific about these peripherals except the connector and sample code. Many Bluetooth modules convert to async serial. Almost all MCUs have an UART to interface with async serial peripherals.

[Crazy Ape]

I've got a similar array of boards floating about the place.

A possible solution is to buy a base board for the STM32F4 Discovery, and make wiring adaptors out of experimental board (bread board / hole board or whatever you call it) for the other MCU boards. Then you can use any modules supported by the base board.

Example base board.
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/STM32F4DISCOVERY-STM32F407VGT6-STM32F407-STM32-ARM-Cortex-M4-Development-Board-Open407V-D-Standard/751537905.html

[psycho0815]

for Ethernet and wlan there are Wiznet modules for example. They do have shields, but you could also use just the plain module. Its controlled via spi which pretty much any mcu can do.
For bluetooth there are very cheap serial to bluetooth bridges on ebay. Just connect them to the uart on your mcu and your golden. I suppose there are other modules for other protocols as well, but that's the one i've used so far. Also there quite a few lcdmodules out there for I²C, which again should be available on just about any mcu.

[dannyf]

I used CoIDE for the STM32 but found they went to great effort to restrict me from modify my damn GUI... it bothers me that I have to hack config files in order to get a non-white background in the GUI (first world problem ).

1. right click in the editor window;
2. click "Preferences" (down at bottom of the options);
3. choose all sorts of color options, including foregrounds and backgrounds, to your liking.

Or you always have the more difficult option: hack the config files.

That's the beauty of Eclipse: you can do it the easy way; or you can do it the hard way.