STM32CubeMX2 Feedback: Promising with some usability issues
The new tooling is nice and the UI is much cleaner to navigate with.
Positive Feedback
- We love the VS Code direction
- YES, it would be helpful to get H5 on here as well as it would keep our code bases aligned.
- AI? No thank you, “focus to stay on reliability, documentation quality, and API maturity”. As anyone savvy knows, AI scrapes those docs anyways. Good docs and samples help a lot.
A few of issues we’re running into that are major speed bumps. I don’t know where your bug list is at to report or to see if it’s tracked:
- Code Generation overwrites our `main.c` EVERY TIME. Yes it’s documented above, yet this is painful.
- The `*.c.base@x.y.z” files are just absolute clutter! “YAGNI” - You Ain’t Gonna Need It
- And i can’t disable it either, that option is always grayed out.
- Upgrading from CubeMX2 v1.01 to 1.1.1
- Broke the EXTI configuration screen, and the page NEVER renders.
- Causes other lack of functionality issues
- Feel free to reach out to me.
- Inability to pull Packs dynamically from command line (i.e. like PlatformIO does or NuGet packages)
- These things are 45.9 MB for a 300 KB project. That’s insane when you have Bootloader + OpCode in a repo (90mb??)
- We got do do a workaround by creating 5 new repos to maintain via Git Submodule versus treating it like a downloadable artifact on build servers.
- Also, regenerating via CubeMX2 wipes out our “main.c”, can’t do that either.
- CMake build configurations “Debug” and “Release missing on generation
- It makes a “_debug_gcc_stm32c563ret6”. TL;DR: “Debug” suffices.
- Never generated one for release builds.
- From what I can tell, CubeMX2 only generates for one MCU only anyways.
- An improved “.gitignore” would be helpful as we don’t really need:
- .settings/exported-files.json
- *.c.base@*
- *.ld.base@*
- compile_commands.json ← Auto-generated by compiler
- .clangd ← Auto-generated by compiler
- And any other extra generated slop
- “.settings/exported-files.json” is picking up on “Build” folder artifacts
- Build isn’t even in source control; adding an extra 1129 lines.
We all know Rome wasn’t built in a day. Looking forward to the future progress.
