kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Dick Hollenbeck <dick@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 10/13/2012 05:48 AM, Vesa Solonen wrote:
> 13.10.2012 02:48, Craig Southeren kirjoitti:
>
>> Same deal - 32 bit ARM M4, up to 1M of flash and 192k of RAM with USB, CAN etc. Clock speeds in the same range
>>
>> I can also recommend the Chibios RTOS, if you need one.
> A while ago OpenOCD didn't work for STM32, but it seems not to be the 
> case any more. A nice tutorial for building the toolchain [1].
>
> -Vesa
>
>
> [1] http://www.triplespark.net/elec/pdev/arm/stm32.html


Nothing wrong with that.  But its easier to simply download and use the free one from
mentor, which is basically the same thing as you running this script, minus a certain
amount of time.

Also note that Freescale, TI, NXP, are also very engaged producers of the Cortex M3 and
M4.  The minor exception is that Freescale got on board a little late, picked up the
Cortex M4 as their initial point of entry, but also offer that M4 without the single
precision floating point unit, so they can reach down and compete with the M3 on price.

I picked Freescale for a recent design I did, they are quite innovative in the design of
their peripherals, and after studying all 4 vendors, came away thinking I was getting the
best bang for the buck with Freescale.  About the time I completed the schematic, I got an
email from TI advertising the launchpad, at near free $.  This board has two of the same
CPUs on it, one for jtag debugging, but it can be used other than that since there is a
UART to UART connection between the two. 


So I bought numerous units, and suspended my freescale design, for a later date.  My
design has ethernet on it, but the launchpads were going to be good enough for my short
term needs, plus it is the M4 with FPU. 


This is an example of how these vendors are beating each other up on price.  To capitalize
on that, you have be prepared to view them all as viable contenders.  ARM is winning in
all this.

Since the cortex M3 core is unified and comes from ARM, (being differentiated mostly by
vendor specific peripheral augmentation), I would guess that openocd if it works on one
cortex m3 probably works on most all.  (I've not used it yet for cortex, sticking with
serial port printf()s for now.)

ST is not the only game in town.  Freescale, TI, and NXP are all very serious players
also.  Be sure and give them a look too, we don't want a monopoly to form here.