I think that's what AVR is; there is a clear (and reasonably straightforward) path from Arduino to production on a custom board. I'm a total hack/n00b and my first AVR PCB worked.

I suspect that STM and TI are of similar difficulty, but I've only seriously played with Atmel because of the Arduino dev board (and related ecosystem).

10 year guaranteed availability of the exact same part is not guaranteed, but there's a clear enough lifecycle policy and paying any attention, you'll have a chance to a make a final "lifetime" buy. (If have the luxury problem that you're selling so much product that a lifetime buy is impractical, the NRE for a redesign is probably manageable for your business.)

The documentation for STM and TI is far, far below the standard of Atmel's, both officially and unofficially. It's more difficult to find information, there's a much smaller development community for beginners and the boards start in TQFP.

That last part alone stops most people from playing with ARM, because you're almost forced to get boards made. At least with AVR/PIC you can prototype most of the Atmegas on a breadboard. Obviously there's a limit to what you can do with an AVR, but you can do a lot with 20MHz.

This may be an ARM thing though. I found it much more difficult to find development documentation for Atmel's XMega platform, I didn't even look at the SAM chips.

TI's website is a rabbit hole though. Sometimes the datasheet is enough, other times you have to go to their weird Wiki which looks unfinished. Sometimes it's available for free, other times you have to log in to get the information. STM isn't much better.

It's a crying shame. ARM is more capable and often cheaper and lower power than going the 8-bit route, but it's a pain in the arse to get started.

In terms of layout though, there isn't much in it. There are datasheets from ST that tell you what the mandatory hookups/passives are. Everything else is more or less identical to any other microcontroller, though you may need to worry about speed.

You can always get MSP430 Launchpads at $9.99 which comes with a MSP430G2x in a DIP. You can breadboard it if you want or you can run it on the board itself. The individual MSP430G2x are also pretty cheap. So if you blow one up you can always replace the chip.

The documentation for STM and TI is far, far below the standard of Atmel's, both officially and unofficially. It's more difficult to find information, there's a much smaller development community for beginners and the boards start in TQFP.

>That last part alone stops most people from playing with ARM, because you're almost forced to get boards made. At least with AVR/PIC you can prototype most of the Atmegas on a breadboard. Obviously there's a limit to what you can do with an AVR, but you can do a lot with 20MHz.

Isn't it why we have development/prototyping boards right? You can always develop/experiment your code in it and also develop your PCB in parallel. In this way when there are problems with your custom board you can always be sure of your code.

In my experience TI documentation is excellent but their software sometimes is over engineered especially TI-RTOS.

Personally I have worked on the STM32F series and I found the documentation good. Also if you want to read through the internals of the ARM architecture you will have to refer to the ARM manuals from ARM website.

The problem, I think, is that there's aggressive cost-cutting by large players who have experienced teams of EEs working on the projects and are willing to spend a lot on NRE costs if it means they can save pennies on each piece. This does not create a friendly market for self-taught start-up hackers.

> and that has a clear path to switch from dev board to own IC.

The core problem why many startups get stuck with Raspberry Pi, Arduino and friends is exactly the "dev board" problem.

When building an MVP and I have the choice between a $20 Pi/Arduino/Pi Compute Board and a $1.000+ dev board, hell I'll choose the Pi option. Lots more support, especially because any combo of I/O and a Pi has been tried by someone else before in contrast to $weird_sensor+$weird_niche_devboard, and especially you will want about 10 or more units so you can afford to blow a couple boards. This will happen inevitably during development, either by "fat fingering" +12V to a 3V3 input or by blowing the wrong eFuse, and better to lose 20$ than 1k$, not to mention you have to raise the 10k first...

There are plenty of dev board from manufacturers under $100. They're just too bad to compete with the Arduino/Pi.

It's not fun figuring out a board with no documentation and shit tools that noone ever used.

The complexity of developing professional firmware is one the main tools chip companies have against their customers switching chips. So they won't go invest a lot of money explicitly against this goal.

The complexity of any embedded software and IC is enough as lock in.

It doesn't justify why they make it so hard to set an IO pin or to load a program on their chips.

I don't think it's a question of the state of a Silicon manufacturer's $hit. Nothing about what you propose is technically complex. It just takes a large, long term investment to build and support a platform like that for >10 years. The manufacturers probably haven't done it because they don't see a big enough market yet. Most big consumer hardware co's can just develop their own solutions internally, and hardware startups are still incredibly niche.

uhh, the atmel stuff is pretty freaking good.

How do you think particle.io?