STC 8051 MCUs: yay or nay?

[janekm]

ST are competing heavily against STC in the Chinese market (are the names a coincidence?  ) by practically price-dumping on the STM8 range of chips.
STM8S003F3P6 gets advertised at under 1RMB, volume pricing might be slightly lower still.

And that's a much more modern, "sensible" design than the STC51 as far as I can see, with all the modern peripherals you'd expect, even 10bit ADC, of course on chip debugging, UART, I2C, SPI, ...

The cheapest model has 1KB of RAM and 8KB of Flash.

BTW I see the STM8 line much more commonly used on really low-cost Chinese products (like 10RMB LED controllers etc) than the STC line.

However there aren't too many teaching material out there targeting STM8 in China...

I just spent literally 30s looking for that, and I don't even read Chinese, and came across this dev board with 81 hours of video tutorials, and many PDFs of documentation... Seems like that could keep you busy for a while? It does look more targeted to the needs of industry, with topics like "how to connect to CAN bus" "how to connect to LCD display" etc. But I'd be pretty happy if dev boards came with that kind of documentation in English

https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.62.EPMNum&id=531379008661&ns=1&abbucket=13#detail

Also ST have big teams of sales / app engineers in China,  which may go part way to explaining the ubiquity of their chips.

[coppice]

However there aren't too many teaching material out there targeting STM8 in China...

Really? STM32 is everywhere in Chinese designs, it is surprising that ST doesn't promote their low end STM8 in China.
Probably they are not popular in colleges, but in industry, it may be a different story. Just like Altera in academia vs Xilinx in industry.

STM's promotion of STM32 in China is more visible than their promotion of other product lines, but STM has serious support for all its MCUs in China. In fact, some of its MCUs barely have any visibility outside China.

[technix]

However there aren't too many teaching material out there targeting STM8 in China...

Really? STM32 is everywhere in Chinese designs, it is surprising that ST doesn't promote their low end STM8 in China.
Probably they are not popular in colleges, but in industry, it may be a different story. Just like Altera in academia vs Xilinx in industry.

STM's promotion of STM32 in China is more visible than their promotion of other product lines, but STM has serious support for all its MCUs in China. In fact, some of its MCUs barely have any visibility outside China.

At least in my university the EE department uses a lot of STC 8051 while the CS department uses a lot of STM32.

[zapzapouch]

STC websites like https://www.stcmcudata.com/ keep being blocked for malware.  I tried downloading their tools months ago and had these problems, and now I'm trying again and still having them.  Looks like the culprit is http://www.stcmicro.com/rar/Keilv802.rar ?

This is the file that you need to use STC MCUs with Keil µVision, correct?

VirusTotal still says it's bad: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/5127b7bb4886a232127e0fe9b02656e8fe46d01a31c0b6017e9b835bddae223a

The website says 防止被杀毒软件误报错 = "Prevents errors from being mistakenly reported by antivirus software".  o_O

Are these not the IC manufacturer's official websites?

I downloaded the file, but I'm not touching it unless I can figure out why it's being flagged as malicious.

[wraper]

VirusTotal still says it's bad: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/5127b7bb4886a232127e0fe9b02656e8fe46d01a31c0b6017e9b835bddae223a

It doesn't. All that it shows seems to be some false positives from heuristic analysis of mostly bottom of the barrel antiviruses. Not actual virus signature detection.

[WattsThat]

Professionally, I have written tons of 8080 and Z80 assembler for industrial control in 80’s and 90’s, never used an 8051 so I felt like I missed a piece of history. When I discovered the cheap Chinese LED clock kits used the STC 15 series parts, I decided it was time to learn and so I wrote my own version of firmware for the clocks from scratch for fun, it’s one of several versions available on Github.

Started out with the bootleg Kiel stuff, which worked well but I didn’t like using it. Switched to SDCC without problem. I never found any buggie peripherals but I was only using the timers and uarts. The stuff just works. My only complaint would be the limited English based documentation and that all the demo programs, of which there are many, are about 95% commented in Chinese.

Would I use it for a product? No. But, that wasn’t the goal. If I had to do it over again, would I change anything? Probably not. But, if I had done it 10-15 years ago, it would have been a different result. What I learned was that the 8051 was a pretty limited machine. Not quite as pea-brained as the 8008 but it was a close second.

[SiliconWizard]

I used Cypress FX1 and FX2, something like 15 years ago. For flexible and cheap USB interfacing, that was good enough. Used SDCC with them. A lot of limitations though. Back then, there was not a lot of options, at least at this price point and as flexible.

These days, I wouldn't touch them anymore. There are more MCUs with USB than we can imagine, at various price points. No reason to bother with 8051-based stuff anymore IMO. But the FX2 still finds its way in relatively recent products. I guess one benefit is that it's still cheap for USB 2.0 HS, and it has a FIFO interface.

[nctnico]

VirusTotal still says it's bad: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/5127b7bb4886a232127e0fe9b02656e8fe46d01a31c0b6017e9b835bddae223a

It doesn't. All that it shows seems to be some false positives from heuristic analysis of mostly bottom of the barrel antiviruses. Not actual virus signature detection.

Recently I had a similar incident with my website as well. False positive for a self installing software package  If you don't respond then the domain authority will disable your entire domain. The idiots running the scan service (Netcraft in this case) appearantly treat any installer as a potential virus

[voltsandjolts]

https://www.stcmicro.com/rar/
STC actually have a copy of the Keil C51 compiler in their downloads section, with the crack tool included.
So professional.

[zapzapouch]

It doesn't. All that it shows seems to be some false positives from heuristic analysis of mostly bottom of the barrel antiviruses. Not actual virus signature detection.

Malwarebytes detects malware, too.

https://www.stcmicro.com/rar/
STC actually have a copy of the Keil C51 compiler in their downloads section, with the crack tool included.
So professional.

It looks like the Keil_lic_v2.exe crack is the file that triggers the Malware.Heuristic.  So it's just triggered because it modifies unrelated system files or something?

I guess this isn't the .rar file I actually need, though, if I already have a legit copy of Keil C51.

This page describes the process of adding it to Keil, which is actually done with the stc-ispX.XX.zip files.  (Those get flagged as malware, too, but by fewer engines...)

• stc-isp-15xx-v6.88I.zip "3 security vendors flagged this file as malicious"
• stc-isp-15xx-v6.88I-tiny.zip "2 security vendors flagged this file as malicious"

Edit:

Malwarebytes and Avast didn't have a problem with stc-isp-15xx-v6.88I-tiny.zip, so I ran it, but then Avast had a problem with it.  "Anti-Exploit shield".

Oh, it may just be from the software trying to contact www.stcmcudata.com which is on URL:Blacklist.

But that file doesn't seem to include the Keil modifications.  The other one does?  But that one asks for administrator permissions, also gets flagged as malware by a few engines, and includes instructions for modifying your system to allow drivers without signatures.

"由于 Windows10 64 位操作系统在默认状态下，对于没有数字签名的驱动程序是不能安装成
功的。所以在安装 STC-USB 驱动前，需要按照如下步骤，暂时跳过数字签名，即可顺利安
装成功。"

"Since Windows 10 64-bit operating systems by default cannot be installed as a driver without a digital signature for
Therefore, before installing the STC-USB driver, you need to follow the steps below to skip the digital signature for the time being, so that you can install it without any problems."

'电脑重启后，会弹出“启动设置”界面，按“F7”按钮来选择“禁止驱动程序强制签名”项'

'After the computer reboots, the "Startup Settings" screen will pop up, press the "F7" button to select the "Disable driver forced signature" item'

I've never seen any other embedded development software that requires all this...

[wraper]

"Since Windows 10 64-bit operating systems by default cannot be installed as a driver without a digital signature for
Therefore, before installing the STC-USB driver, you need to follow the steps below to skip the digital signature for the time being, so that you can install it without any problems."

'电脑重启后，会弹出“启动设置”界面，按“F7”按钮来选择“禁止驱动程序强制签名”项'

'After the computer reboots, the "Startup Settings" screen will pop up, press the "F7" button to select the "Disable driver forced signature" item'

I've never seen any other embedded development software that requires all this...

They did not bother to submit the driver to Microsoft for validation (and pay for it). That's why it asks to enable win 10 test mode which allows unsigned drivers to run.

[Mark19960]

I tried to get their development bits.. ICSP etc.
It didn't pan out.
They responded and told me how much it cost but when I wanted to buy it things went silent.

I still would like to take a crack at them. They only wanted 30 USD for it which is totally reasonable.