Thanks everyone for the links.

@Rachel

I follow the same path my friend!

I see there being a Linux solution very soon. Running tools in WINE is kind of noob especially for engineering level tools.

For $7 you are a fool if you can’t see that this is an amazing deal . Saying you will not get it because it isn’t for linux is foolish or you have just have too much money.

Are there any Australian distributors?

Has anyone else noticed that either of the free compilers require registration? One of them even has an “I don’t want to receive offers”-esque checkbox.

Maybe they’re subsidizing the costs a bit with address harvesting for marketers? Don’t get me wrong as I’ve ordered mine, but it seems kind of interesting that all of the “free” compilers require requesting a “free” unlock key.

Has anyone looked to see if the “key” you get with the “free” crippled compiler expires at some point?

The STM8S-DISCOVERY is among the items offered as free samples from ST. You can request one here:

https://my.st.com/esample/app?page=basket

For the sake of all of us, don’t be greedy!

threepointone: I used to agree with you on the subject of windows dev tools. I’ve used commercial tools from keil + various other commercial embedded development vendors on projects before. I used to use them in preference to GCC / GDB. However, about six months ago I decided to switch completely over to GCC / GDB, and spent about 2 weeks writing custom automation software that I use for all my ARM projects now. I can’t be happier. While GCC + GDB has an extremely difficult learning curve before you become productive; I’ve found my productivity now is greater than it used to be on windows, purely due to the amount of automation I now have in my design flow.

While some may argue that the same kind of automation is doable on windows; I’ve found that the availability, and ease of scripting of linux command line tools is superior to that on windows. But then again, I’m very proficient in linux.

For the record, I design electronics for a living.

@threepointone
great that you like to have tools working on widows or whatever, other prefers open source software:
- it’s not incompatible, lots of professional embedded system development is done nowadays using open source,
- there are plenty of commercial offers for opensource based development toolkits with professional support, this benefits everybody
- ST does work on open source toolchains (e.g. some of the ST staff are (full time?) developers on gcc/binutils ARM toolchain )
- maybe there is no open source support for those CPU because no one had the incentive to … the success of the MSP430 and AVR’s in “open”/hackers projects will give this incentive, and providing such a cheap kit is probably one step in this direction…

For what it’s worth, I was about to order an mbed, but the final cost of ~70€ from Farnell put me off a bit. I can live with the online nature of that, and I’ll probably end up with one or two anyway, but for the moment I’ve held off – these little cards look like just the ticket for what I want to do at the moment.

So I just ordered a couple of these, for a total of 30€ delivered with some other bits and pieces.

I can live with the windows-only aspect for the moment – after all, Wine OSX or VirtualBox should do the job until I’ve reverse engineered the USB aspect of the programmer, at which point all I need is wine and the compiler. The protocols and instruction set are well documented, so I have confidence that gcc and friends will end up targetting these pretty damn fast.

Anyway, we’ll see what happens. My boards arrive tomorrow.

STM is very wise to offer a great uC for cheap (or free). I am very fond of Texas Instruments products and they have been great to me. I even was given an ez430-f2013 msp dev tool for free, which these devices are around $20 to purchase.
Lately all of my uC work has been with the MSP430 for the fact of ease of use, great support, great IDE and debugger, and also being free.

Now that STM offers this uC dev kit it will be easy to introduce hobbyists/EEs to thier products that we didn’t know existed, or cared to work with. Once they get thier foot in the door, they have you hooked for all your future transistor needs. Same with the MSP430..I never used it until I got my free dev tool from TI, and now I am hooked and I turn to TI for all my IC needs. Now that STM offers a comparable product to TI, they will now get thier share of my business. Good marketing plan! (check out thier samples program, it is good)

(I use XP and Kubuntu, so stop fighting. It is only 7 dollars!)

I have a Parallax Starter kit and I still don’t use it and their staff won’t help me because they say I have to buy a microcontroller kit first to learn that. I’m a busy parent and I don’t have time to read the 31 page manual just to operate the text editor. Most things that are understandable and easy to use should be written by people who can get you to use it in ten minutes.

I know people who program professionally and they don’t want one because they say they aren’t easy to use and Arduino isn’t a real microcontroller because it is programmed for you because most people couldn’t program the real thing.

I met someone retired who works in the industry and he suggested a TI or Atmel starter kit. One runs on a battery for months and has plenty of IO. according to him, the Propeller chip is a pic of an unknown origin and it is programmed to behave a certain way.

If you want to learn Microcontrollers the hard way then hit those books because there is a learning curve and it isn’t easy unless you want something pre-programmed like the Arduino which is what you might need to learn because people don’t know how to teach; they know how to take the instructions out of sequential order and how to put them in alphabetical order so you are more confused.

By the way WINE most likely will not help here, probably because of debugging software too deeply tied up to hardware .
Again this is great. Honestly I was feeling sorry to see so many people recently hook on company that have serious financial struggle, recently was on the edge of sell out and can’t provide stable continuous supply of their product to manufacturers leading them to abandon projects and give up on supplier which lead back to beginning of this close loop of financial struggling . It would be huge middle finger to all those hobbits and hackers if they went out of business. At least STMicroelectronics large enough to survive today’s economical crisis

“As a EE wanting to make cool things, I honestly believe that making cool things has priority (a LOT of priority) over stupid ideological arguments about why one operating system is better than the other. I just want to make something cool, okay?”

…I love you.

I use what ever OS/tool/language/wtfever will accomplish the task appropriately, or if its a rapid prototype, what ever is easy and quick to implement. Sometimes, that forces me to go back to a Windows environment, and that’s just something I accept in a world where there are multiple operating systems available (and what I love about it to!).

Give it time and some focus towards cross platform applications in the future and this can hopefully happen less and less.

@Ben Ryves

You’re right, the picaxe stuff is easy to learn, but the interpreted nature of the BASIC they use means that you’re a long way from pushing the actual limits of the chips. This is not usually a particular problem for the hobbyist, given the cost of the chips in question – it’s easier and cheaper to simply go for something with a bit more “poke”. It certainly doesn’t mean they’re no good, either; the ignition system on my motorcycle is controlled by a PIC :)

That said, if you’re looking to produce a commercial product, you need as much code as possible in as little chip as possible; if you’re not pushing the capabilities then you’re wasting money. Learning to do that is hard.

As for the “ideological” concerns WRT windows, I’m one of those who doesn’t use Windows unless they are absolutely forced to because it gets in the way of doing actual work. It’s slow, unreliable, massively expensive, and doesn’t work the way I do. There’s nothing ideological in that, I don’t “hate” MS, even though I consider that they have, over the last 25 years, been a considerable millstone around the neck of computing as a whole. My choice of OS is purely pragmatic; I have better things to do with my time than work around the holes in cr*p software. But hey, if it works for you, that’s fine, too.

Sorry, Windows it the way of the EE life.

I was a Linux fan (still use it for personal web surfing ect..)

Now as a designer I have to use windows.

why?

1. No GOOD schematic capture or PCB design tools for Linux.

2. You can use wine for most compilers but Linux does not support the programing hardware.

For a $7 dev board… Throw a windows partition on you Linux box.

Digi-Key alone has now sold around 200 of these since this was posted. I bet they are scratching their heads, wondering why this item got to popular so sudden.

“For a $7 dev board… Throw a windows partition on you Linux box.”

I’m sorry, are you suggesting I buy a ~$100 OS to use a $7 piece of hardware, or that I pirate software in order to use the $7 piece of hardware? Because both seem to be exceptionally poor pieces of advice.

There is no “ideology” behind why I don’t have a copy of Windows in my house. I’m with Mr Foo, Windows just doesn’t work for me. It is a slow and terribly implemented OS which simply cannot do the things I need it to do. Most of things I do on my machines on a daily basis are either impossible/impractical to do under Windows, or at least would entail considerable software above and beyond the base Windows install (pushing the cost of ownership even higher).

I can’t help but cringe when I read a “rant” like threepointone posted above (I hate to call anyone out specifically, but if you post a rant on a public forum you are opening yourself up to at least a few direct responses), because all I can see is “I clicked something, and nothing happened, and nothing came up to tell me what to do next so I went online and waited for 10 minutes and nobody helped me so I gave up.” I simply cannot fathom that sort of mentality. If I see a problem, on the computer or anywhere else, I have an imperative to understand (and ideally) fix whatever it is. I am incapable of simply saying “I dunno, doesn’t work. I’ll do something else then”, and almost everyone else I have ever met in the hacking community was the same way. The desire to learn and fix should be a hacker’s (or engineer’s) primary motivation in all aspects of life. We see that fact day in and day out on this very site (well…most days).

Nothing new or creative has ever been done by looking at a problem or shortcoming in current implementations or understandings and simply giving up. Frankly, I am exceptionally dubious of how much “awesome” that type of mindset could possibly create.

Is there software out there that is only available for Windows, and won’t run in WINE? Almost certainly, and I am equally sure there are some professions that require said software (which seems to be threepointone’s primary claim), but nobody is talking about making a career out of a $7 board. We just want to be able to use an experiment with the device on our own terms, and the manufacturer ignoring that desire (especially seeing how well it has gone for platforms like the Arduino) is a very poor decision. The amount of comments about the issue on this page alone is proof enough that there is a problem. All talk of “ideology” or bias against a particular OS is completely irrelevant, and certainly does nothing to address the issue at hand.

@MS3FGX
quit whining.

i think i got the last three from mouser

STM site is not feeling well this AM:

“Access Denied (license_expired)

A license has expired on the Proxy, and your request is not permitted: “The SGOS license has expired”
A new license must be obtained.

For assistance, contact your network support team. ”

Oops.

Looks like Digi-Key is sold out…

Wish I knew how to use these :-)

@keith
you are shit out of luck if you were hoping to do video processing with this little puppy here. Your choices are wide and open but dont forget to wear your toupe because it is time to pay.
check this baby out and it is not cheap. http://focus.ti.com/general/docs/wtbu/wtbuproductcontent.tsp?contentId=14649&navigationId=12643&templateId=6123
Typically processing video requires lots of memory which entry level uCs like these lack and require a dedicated MAC(multiply accumulate) that could do all the floating point calculations involved in processing your video data.

as much as the lack of mac/linux tools is annoying, it is unfortunately very much expected, neither microchip or atmel provide IDEs for either.

even with such a cheap price, the crippled compiler really puts me off, even the pic C compiler isn’t that crippled

@Ben Ryves
I have access to windows machines, but the real expense is in the software. Compilers, CADs, and analyzers cost thousands of dollars each. Companies have expense accounts and investors, but a little student like me would go bankrupt just getting a LED to blink with most development systems.

@Rachel for students there is always two options, infective time waist, or victimless crime

$7 for something that readily allows you to do rapid prototyping where alternative solutions are in multiples the price range. It makes sense.

I love when people try to enlighten you on productive work flow and have no end-results to reference. It’s like what merit do you have to be giving ‘in my day’ rants.?

Therian,

you should just ask to their marketing guy. The hobbyist are key users to me. This is the reason of this positioning.

I sound like an ST marketing guy. Maybe I am?? who knows?
Patoche

@Ragnar
“how big is Linux in the target market, embedded systems? Ah, now you see! ”

No I dont, I absolutely dont see how can you compare quantity of embedded systems to quantity Linux users. Following yours logic every freaking router, cablebox, server,traffic monitor…what ewer, counts for a person ?!

“Besides that, all the existing µC vendors offer a Linux version already”
every ? some? maybe tiny % will be more correct and mostly happens in cases of some vanilla gcc adaptation

“why would I want to waste my time as a developer on a new system, that puts stones in my way?”

honestly its looks like developer put stones in his work instead of blamed OC and more psychological reason than technical. What if you get great job offering but they specify what you do where and how and its not yours favorite choices, will you refuse slimy for that ? How many tools you actually rejecting just because they dont match some ideology of yours ? it rubbish, after all OC is just a tool, not yours gender, religion, race or wife