ST8500 question

[Gareth Thomson]

Posted on July 09, 2018 at 13:01

Good day, everyone,

I have tried using the ST7590 QFN chip and I found that its functionality is limited, and the TQFP package is the advertised stand-alone chip. 

I have been advised (if I am going to make a change) I might as well move to the ST8500. 

If I do make the change I would like to get a feel for the chip first. 

I have never used an ST microcontroller and I see there is a project building tool called CubeMX. I would like to find out if only the STM32 are supported or are their other chips like the ST8500 are supported?

Even though I will need to sign an SLA to use this chip, will I still be able to ask questions in a public forum (such as this one) about setting up UART, analogue-read, digital IO, using the cortex-M4 built-in functions and other such functions or will that breach the contract?

I do not intend to put up any documentation I get from signing the SLA, but this is a more complex chip than the ST7590 and support from only one source (smart-gird) will be slow and could get annoying (for them).

Any help would be appreciated, thank you.

Kind regards,

GT

#cubemx-4.26 #sla #st8500 #cortex-m4 #st7590

[Tesla DeLorean]

Posted on July 09, 2018 at 15:28

For questions to work in a public forum you'd need a quorum of people using the part and willing to participate, honestly not seeing that for these parts. These power parts seem relatively niche, the people using them likely your competition. Data sheets, manuals and software released under NDA or SLA are not open for discussion.

For the power-line parts you'd really want to cultivate a relationship with the local ST sales, representatives and FAEs, they may also have a list of individuals/companies providing consultancy in the area of interest. Engineering support is usually aligned with order sizes, threshold here likely to be 100K units/annum.

You might want to look at using the On-line Support system.

https://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/support/support-home.html

 

[Antonio Vilei]

Posted on July 10, 2018 at 14:40

Hi Gareth,

for specific questions about 

ST8500 or 

ST7590, I recommend following the approach suggested by Clive and get directly in touch with ST.

If you would like to use an ST microcontroller like STM32, you can post related questions to this forum. So long as you don’t mention items that are restricted by your NDA, you wouldn’t breach the contract. For example, you talked about setting up UART, analogue-read, digital IO, using the cortex-M4 built-in functions, etc. These things are quite generic and they’re unrelated to the power parts. I’m sure you would get an answer here. Of course, for legal reasons, you would need to exclude any details about ST7590 or ST8500 from your request.

Please feel free to discuss these legal aspects with your ST representative or distributor.

Out of curiosity, what microcontroller are you currently using? If you had issues with UART, or other peripherals of your MCU, you would be free to ask a question on the forum of that MCU vendor. The same applies to STM32.

Of course, if you decide to go for an ST microcontroller, the ST Field Application Engineers who support you for the power products would be happy to help you with the MCU, too.

Best regards,

Antonio