Looking for STM32 Eval Board with Native DALI Interface Support

[Yaadesh]

Hi,

I am working on a lighting control project and looking for an STM32 evaluation board that supports native DALI interface.

By native support, I mean:

• The MCU or board includes a built-in DALI transceiver or dedicated hardware for DALI communication.
• It has UART or GPIOs pre-configured for DALI timing.
• The board is supported by official firmware libraries for DALI protocol handling.

Does ST offer any evaluation boards or MCUs with these features built-in? Or would I need to implement DALI support entirely in software with an external transceiver?

Any suggestions or guidance would be appreciated.

Thanks and Regards,
Yaadesh S

[Ozone]

NXP had one about a decade ago, but AFAIK they dropped it soon.

I think DALI is just a too specialized niche product to justify investment into development platforms, especially since it involves mostly the lowest-cost section of MCUs. I never came across any general-purpose MCU that natively supported a DALI interface. And basically all DALI products I had been working on at that time used low-cost 8-bit MCUs (MCP or Atmel).

[Yaadesh]

Can you confirm  low-cost 8-bit MCUs (MCP or Atmel) which supports all native DALI?

[Ozone]

No, I never came accross one.
The company I worked for back then used standard GPIO, with "bit-banging" anlgorithms.

That was about 10 years ago, and I never came across a native DALI interface in any commercial MCU ever since.

You might look up DALI open source projects, or perhaps some ST employee here can enlighten us.

[Andrew Neil · Accepted solution]

As in this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Addressable_Lighting_Interface ?

There is a Partner stack: https://www.st.com/en/partner-products-and-services/dali-stack.html - maybe they can help you?

There's this for STM8: https://www.st.com/en/evaluation-tools/steval-ilm001v1.html

both via: https://www.google.com/search?q=DALI+STM32 (other search engines are available)

As @Ozone said, probably a bit niche for a dedicated dev board; Maybe look for Arduino shields ...

MikroElectronica have a couple (not Arduino specific):

https://www.mikroe.com/dali-click

https://www.mikroe.com/dali-2-click

https://projecthub.arduino.cc/NabiyevTR/simple-dali-controller-c652b7

https://github.com/hubsif/arduino-dali

via: https://www.google.com/search?q=DALI+Arduino 

[Andrew Neil]

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@Yaadesh wrote:

Can you confirm  low-cost 8-bit MCUs (MCP or Atmel) which supports all native DALI?

---

You realise that Atmel is Microchip?  has been for many years now!

Google finds this:

AN2539, "DALI 2.0 Slave Stack for tinyAVR® 1-Series Microcontrollers"

https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/Appnotes/00002539A.pdf

[Ozone]

On a related note, we did mostly use MC PIC18 back then, which had to be as cheap as possible - which means minimal on-chip Flash/RAM.
We are talking about a mass product here, were BOM costs trump every design, compatibility and architectural aspects.
By the way, Atmel was still not Microchip back then ...

At that time, Microchip offered custom MCUs (PIC18) with a (more or less) dedicated DALI interface for a guaranteed order of >10k p.a.

It still was "more or less" proper DALI, because the standard requires very specific signal rise and fall times, which require external analog components. But the biphase-decoding would be done on-chip.