Against all warnings and hate threads and other anti ST campaigns I decided for a next project to just try out the CubeMX / SW4STM "experience"
Bought a few nucleo 476 boards and downloaded a lot of stuff from st.com
Yesterday evening I spent two hours installing and watching some youtube movies instead of reading 5000 pages of manuals
I am old school but lets do this the 21st century way, leave the books and follow the video.
This evening another three hours watching some youtube instruction movies and just went for it.
Downloaded and installed the packages for the STM32L4 family and tried to create a blinky.
First tries failed miserably because I choose the nucle board layout with tons of peripherals that are not configured ok it seems or I have to do some extra stuff.
So followed the kid on the video erased all pins and defined a couple of pins for the simple experiment.
Total of five hours and I have a blinky, MX generates the code for whatever toolchain you want (IAR,Keil, SW4STM and some other stuff), i choose the SW4STM and can now compile, run and debug.
Yeah, I am totally happy actually after all the hate threads I read earlier. Total code size for my debug blinky is 5kB which can be considered large (although I think it is peanuts if you look at everything that needs to be initialized) yes but hell my $7 chip has 1MB , who gives a *(&^ ?
Then the clocksettings are a miracle, you can just see the page from the datasheet as a GUI, experiment with all the settings and directly see if something is going wrong (out of the correct parameter space) and let MX correct it automagically. Beautifull, I can't see why someone does not love this.
The thing I do not like is the comment in between where the user can put its code, rather ugly but necessary if you want MX to change something and re-generate the rest of the code.
Perhaps in a few weeks when I am struggling with some peripherals my experience will change but for now I am really puzzled why there is so much anger against this 100% cost free toolchain.