[chbot] ARM toolchain comparisons for STM32 F0, F1, and F4

[mikael stewart]

I wasn't a fan of stm32cube or Eclipse either, but eventually I caved in.

I use System Workbench by AC6 (Eclipse based IDE with GCC toolchain and
open source flash loader tools) along with STM32CubeMX to generate skeleton
code which has an option for System Workbench.

This pairing has worked out of the box nicely for me. I especially like
using the code generator for setting up clock routing and dealing with
timer peripherals which can be tedious and complex on some of the M3 and M4
devices. IMHO it is much better thought-out than Freescale/NXP's hodgepodge
effort.

The other thing I'd say is that it's nice being able to retain your source
code when you regenerate code. It enables you to scale your project up
module-by-module, drastically reassign peripherals, change clocking etc
with some confidence that you wont continually break previous
modules/dependencies along the way.

Loading the generated project/source code in System Workbench is a matter
of file > import, and it should build first go, though I actually
initialize a Git repo first, then import as git project. Yay! No command
line work.

Worst thing? CubeMX and the Cube libs were little buggy last time I
checked. There was a DMA issue I had where I had to disable/reenable a DMA
channel to get it to load a timer edge capture correctly. I needed an
interrupt to do this, so if it wasn't for the fact that I was capturing a
burst of edges spaced ~100ns apart, then it would have somewhat defeated
the purpose of using DMA in the first place. Also the RTC generator is/was
daft. It would reload a hard-coded time value on reboot with no option to
disable this from being generated.

Cheers

Mikael

On Wed, Sep 12, 2018 at 10:27 PM Mark Atherton <markaren1 at xtra.co.nz> wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> Does anyone have any experience with the various toolchains out there
> for the STM32 ?
>
> Most of the stuff I do is bare-metal, but am definitely not a fan of
> stm32cube, or Eclipse.
>
> Obvious choices seem to be Keil uVison; the limited code-size trial IDE
> seems to be excellent. but looks like $$$$ is involved for the
> professional unlimited versions. I understand that ARM bought Keil a
> while ago, and that this product is their tool of choice.
>
> ARM do have a free toolchain gcc-arm-none-eabi (85MB) available, which
> seems odd given the conflict of interest with Keil.
>
> openSTM32 (owned by ac6) have an open source 'System Workbench for
> STM32' which seems bulky (!) at over 450MB.
>
> Finally, at least the older uVision toolchain appears to allow GCC tools
> to be installed. Anyone used this combination, if there is no code limit
> size on their debugger, this would be ideal.
>
> Comments, thoughts and experiences please.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Mark
>
>
>
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