The new 'G474 DISCO misses the point, IMO

[waclawek.jan]

Discos have been valuable tools to get people start with the STM32. IMO, the newest 'G474 Disco misses this point (and it appearst this is a trend in the newer Discos):

• It is too expensive. One of the selling points of the Discos was the great value for great price. I know ST sells them at a loss, to be recouped at chip sales later; this does not appear to be the case here. Maybe it's the unnecessarily fancy 'F7-based STLink3, maybe the U-suffixed part used there, maybe ST doesn't want to sell at a loss anymore, maybe combination of all these factors; but... the 'G4 ought to be a replacement/upgrade on the 'F3 line; 'G474 in particular with HRTIM is an equivalent of 'F334. The 'F334 DISCO sells at a whopping 17$, showcasing mostly the same major features. Versus $59 introductory price for the 'G474 Disco. Go figure.
• The name does not sell it as a Disco; does not sell at all. B-G474E-DPOW1, what?
• UM is in the atrocious "modern look and feel"
• Schematics is missing from the UM. BAD BAD IDEA.

My 2 eurocents.

JW

PS. The other 'G4 DIsco- the 'G431 one - is a COMPLETELY different story (except the name (B-G431B-ESC1), sigh...)

[Ozone]

> The schematics are no more in the user manuals of new ST boards for the purpose to ease the maintenance of both resources.

To dwell on this point, too:

Downloaded a Nucleo 144 manual yesterday, and was shocked. A size of 22 MByte for a 7-page document, with one picture.

A manual comes in handy when a decision has been made, and is expected to deliver proper and detailed information. Not pretty marketing look.

Engineers are not marketing guys.

[Amel NASRI]

No one "talks through me", I just explained the "why" reason of the schematic remove from the UM.

That is why I don't argue about the decisions: bad or good.

[Ozone]

> No one "talks through me", I just explained the "why" reason of the schematic remove from the UM.

I think - and I believe many here would agree - more forum participation of ST engineering staff would improve the quality of this forum considerably.

[Nikita91]

It seems that ST has a big marketing budget, to the detriment of the quality budget for example.

As it seems that there are more graphic designers than software developers (see the Ethernet driver which still does not work on H7) or hardware (design flaws in STM32 devices).

For example, from a quality point of view why have almost identical peripherals, but with registers not quite in the same place (DAM1/DMA2 vs BDMA on H7) or slightly different names (APB1LENR/APB1HENR on H7 vs APB1ENR1/APB1ENR2 on L4 +)? It's horrible when you employ several families and you have to mutualize the code. It seems that everyone does what they want at ST, to the detriment of customers ...

About the table of contents at the beginning of the document and the B&W colors which are good ideas, how is it "modern" to put it at the end of the document and adopt colors that are not very readable? In fact from a marketing point of view it takes change to show that we are active. And editing the doc is easier than producing quality software!

Other subject.

Elsewhere on this site there are references to the hobbyist market that would no longer interest ST. On the contrary: ST puts a lot of resources on CubeMX which is only intended for hobbyists! For example in the company that employs me and designs industrial products (lifespan of 10 to 20 years), we cannot trust this kind of tool.

In my case, it was through my personal development and my knowledge of STM32 products that I was able to offer my company to use MCUs, which it is doing more and more. ST would be wrong to ignore the hobbyists, and not to offer efficient software libraries.

About the HAL, clumsy, buggy, with random sustainability, ST is not the only one to go astray in this way. Atmel/Microchip makes the same mistake with Advanced Software Framework (ASF) which tries to unify AVR + AVR32 + ARM.

Why we can't use this tool. Code quality: unqualified generators are frowned upon in the industry. Sustainability: what will CubeMX be in 10 years, we have seen ST abandon several software in recent years...

In reality we prefer to manage the obsolescence of MCUs than that of software, software is what costs the most to my business...

Too bad there is not an advisory committee made up of members from outside ST to guide developments right from the start (at the time of designing the MCUs peripherals).