Kevin on Printable Portable Mask Gives You The Numbers On Your Workout.William J Steele on Thirty Seconds At 100 Megakelvins.The Charachorder Keyboard Is Too Fast For Competition 37 Comments Hope some of you will agree and add comments – that might steer ST in slightly different direction :) Now, a shameless plug, if you get time, take a look at my post on ST’s forum (over there I’m under m_kisacanin). If you ask me, I’m still having Arduino on my top shelf, if I need to do something quickly and dirty Arduino ruless, but I realy do hope that they (ST) will catch up with the soft side, and then, even at the cost of more complexity, I think that Arduino will become a little brother (in respect to the overall development experience with Discovery). Now, it’s questionable if most of us will realy need it or use it, but I can tell you, when I now go back to Arduino, I kind of, like it less then before :)ĭocumentation is much better and BACAUSE of that much worst then comparable Arduino’s – I’m at the level that I like it KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid), but just reading the help file for 3BEEP I started to appreciate the depth that ST’s aproach brings.Īnd by the way, Arduino’s library IS large, but not well organized. Debuger, registry browser, many other extras, realy look cool. In regards to STVD, I quite agree – very complex comparing to Arduino’s GUI, but man, options that one gets can’t be compared with Arduion’s offer. Might be some truth in my thinking that they did hardware release to soon without having the “soft” side ready. Kind of positivelly surprised with quality of the package (documentation, help file, package). Just today, I found two REALY nice additions to the repository (3BEEP and PWM). I have decided to put my exitment on hold for a week or two and give them (ST) a chance to catch up with documentation and code samples. Posted in hardware Tagged debugger, kit, microcontroller, programmer, st-link, stm, stm8, usb Post Frustrated (and others)
But for cost-conscious hackers and for educators needing to equip a whole classroom (or if you’re just looking for a stocking stuffer for your geeky nephew), it’s hard to argue with seven bucks for a full plug-and-play setup.
The development tools are for Windows only, and novice programmers won’t get the same touchy-feely community of support that surrounds Arduino. The Discovery board features a small prototyping area and throws in a touch-sense button for fun as well. The ST-LINK USB programmer/debugger comes attached, but it’s easy to crack one off and use this for future STMicro-compatible projects clearly a plan of giving away the razor and selling the blades.
The STM8S microcontroller is in a similar class as the ATmega328 chip on latest-generation Arduinos: an 8-bit 16 MHz core, 32K flash and 2K RAM, UART, SPI, I2C, 10-bit analog-to-digital inputs, timers and interrupts and all the usual goodness.
A complete microcontroller development kit for little more than the cost of a bare chip? That’s what STMicroelectronics is promising with their STM8S-Discovery: seven dollars gets you not only a board-mounted 8-bit microcontroller with an decent range of GPIO pins and functions, but the USB programmer/debugger as well.