newbie q's

[db_it]

Posted on October 06, 2012 at 05:14

Background: I do stuff with Arduinos now. Win XP.

Discovery4 make the most sense to begin with?

Do these boards include an IDE, debugger, and a compiler, so 100% ready out of the box to do something?

Is there any simple suggested reading to get me setup and past the baby steps of writing my first code?

[Tesla DeLorean]

Posted on October 07, 2012 at 14:53

The boards do not come with any discs or software.

You will need to download an IDE from Keil, IAR or Atollic, etc. Also you'll want to download the firmware library with examples from ST's web page for the board.

For books, check out Joseph Yiu's Definitive Cortex-Mx series.

[db_it]

Posted on October 08, 2012 at 05:57

Thanks for the info.

How does one choose an IDE? Are they all demo versions, or is there one I get to keep using?

Is there any ST quickstart document anywhere that tells me what I should download to begin?

[Tesla DeLorean]

Posted on October 08, 2012 at 06:45

One might start at the board's web page, via the ''Design Support'' tab

http://www.st.com/internet/evalboard/product/252419.jsp

IDE's are mostly about personal preference, and experience. The Keil and IAR tool chains have 32KB code limited evaluation versions that should be sufficient to do most initial testing relatively painlessly. You should start with one of those and get sufficiently orientated to be able to make an educated decision about what it is you actually need.

[db_it]

Posted on October 08, 2012 at 07:04

I should point out that my interest in these is as my hobby, so I can never buy these multi thousand dollar IDE's.

[db_it]

Posted on October 08, 2012 at 07:09

Thanks for the info. Very helpful.

No decent free IDEs for these?

[Tesla DeLorean]

Posted on October 08, 2012 at 13:55

Well there are free chains, and low cost ones. There's GNU/GCC based Yagarto, WinARM, Code Sourcery and Rowley. You can use Eclipse as your IDE, if you like that.

But you want something EASY, which the aforementioned evals are, and the code limits only kick in if you are doing more complicate things. Now how quickly this occurs depends on the things you are doing, but by the time you get there you'll know how the process should work, and have a known working system.

So as a beginner Keil/IAR would get you to your vacation, and put you on the beach so you could enjoy it. GNU/GCC free tools would dump you in the middle of the jungle and you'd need to machete your way out over several miles to get to the beach. Personally I think that makes the learning curve unnecessarily steep.