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Re:How to flash an LED: writing ARM assembly for an STM32 mi... by rabryan on Friday April 03, 2020 @09:43PM (#22775521)
Avoid ST at all costs in my experience. Their documentation is terrible. They never acknowledge hardware errata even after clear evidence of it. They’re not a company with a solid engineering culture imo
Re:How to flash an LED: writing ARM assembly for an STM32 mi... by __init on Friday April 03, 2020 @11:28PM (#22775993)
I'm really surprised to hear that. ST has always been one of my favorite manufacturers. I find their datasheets to be clear and well laid out, though I will note that I'm usually more interested in the hardware side than the software side. Their chips and boards are also high quality and convenient, e.g. GPIOs are often five-volt tolerant, Nucleo boards come with well-made breakout headers and several peripherals (at seemingly impossibly low cost), chips have wide supply voltages, etc. I can't say I know anything about their errata (I've never run into any), but even if the situation is as bad as you say, that's quite a harsh condemnation, especially considering how widely-used and successful they are in industry. Do you have other complaints?
Re:How to flash an LED: writing ARM assembly for an STM32 mi... by rabryan on Sunday April 05, 2020 @10:06AM (#22785601)
I’ve used their accelerometer (LIS2D). Performance and specs are great - it was just a pain to develop the embedded interface with it because the documentation had a bunch of mistatements and was missing critical information (a weak pullup on a certain line caused a bunch of current consumption - took days to figure out). Also they had an off by one bug in their LIFO queue that took a long time to figure out. Once you getting it working its great. Last time I checked they still hadnt updated their documentation with what I reported to them...
Re:How to flash an LED: writing ARM assembly for an STM32 mi... by dmitrygr on Saturday April 04, 2020 @01:31AM (#22776397)
can confirm. found multiple issues around SDRAM interface in STM32f429, only some are in the errata doc
Re:How to flash an LED: writing ARM assembly for an STM32 mi... by detaro on Friday April 03, 2020 @09:44PM (#22775527)
Which MCU makers do you prefer?
Re:How to flash an LED: writing ARM assembly for an STM32 mi... by rabryan on Friday April 03, 2020 @10:31PM (#22775731)
Atmel (now under Microchip). They have great documentation and software libraries. And they actually acknowledge hardware errata in the documentation.
Re:How to flash an LED: writing ARM assembly for an STM32 mi... by userbinator on Saturday April 04, 2020 @12:08AM (#22776136)
And they actually acknowledge hardware errata in the documentation.

More so for Microchip than Atmel --- it's pretty common to find on some of their newer and more complex parts a ton of errata, among which there are some extremely "WTF!?" ones like "feature X does not work at all".

Re:How to flash an LED: writing ARM assembly for an STM32 mi... by rabryan on Sunday April 05, 2020 @10:08AM (#22785614)
Yeah I love those. They highlight features xyz on first page of datasheet. Then on the last few pages its like btw features xyz dont work on rev A-F. And your supplier doesnt know what revs they have...
Re:How to flash an LED: writing ARM assembly for an STM32 mi... by reportingsjr on Friday April 03, 2020 @11:55PM (#22776095)
I used a SAMD21 for my latest project and I was definitely impressed with it versus STM32s.

I will say that STM has definitely released better tools that make it much easier to get designs up and running (STM32Cube specifically).