New project advice

[geneM]

I’m about to start a new embedded project that is probably outside my skill set (as usual) and I’m hoping to get some recommendations on what STM MCU might have a reasonable learning curve to build up the MCU part of this system. It’s another autonomous oceanographic observing platform like I’ve built in the past with a lot of help from people on this forum. That system used a STM32H7 MCU. For this case, I need a few more serial ports and an ethernet connection to a new sensor. And I’ll need a file system and lots of Flash and SRAM. Low power matters, but the MCU is pretty low on the power consumption histogram.

The STM32H5 looks like a good choice since it has lots of serial ports and the Nucleo STM32H563 has an Ethernet phy and a USB-C connector that theoretically could support a USB Flash driver.. Here are a few specific questions

Q0 Is there a better MCU choice with an easier learning curve that might meet my requirements?

Q1. It looks like the H5 and STMCubeMX/IDE now use FileX which seems to require ThreadX to deal with a USB Flash drive. I’m not enthusiastic about have to use ThreadX but I did build a simple CubeMX project with that functionality enabled. It looks like it takes 68K just to handle the Flash drive. Does that seem right? Should I just drop the Flash Drive and fall back to the uSD card I’ve used in the past?

Q2. Per some posts on this forum, it seems like I could fall back to FatFS which I’m more used to. I’ve been trying to get a CubeIDE project running using the STM Classic middleware but it’s a heavy lift for me. Is this approach as complicated as it seems to be?

Q3 I’ve never had to deal with Ethernet in an embedded system. Are there enough examples around that I might be able to get this running without going insane?

Thanks - Gene

 

 

[LCE]

> Ethernet. And I may be able to side step a tonne of stress by buying a fully packaged Ethernet module with a SPI interface like one of the Wiznet modules.

Do some research on that before using it, there will probably still be a lot of communication handling and stuff, kinda “relocating” problems.

 

> 11 UARTs including 1 LPUART

That calls for external ICs, but check the bandwidth of these compared to whatever you need to connect there.

[geneM]

​@Andrew Neil I agree with all your points. I spent the first dozen years of my career working at a defense contractor where a detailed mission requirements document drove the design of the complex, expensive systems we built. I’ve spent the last 30+ years at a non-profit oceanographic research institution where I had to introduce the concept of mission requirements. I can spend all day talking about how to develop an effective mission requirements document in a research environment (and I have). The requirements I mentioned above are the kind of short, simple, easy to understand requirements I have to start with to keep from scaring my scientific research colleagues away.

Cheers - Gene