New project advice
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