2019 STM32 Wish List

[Amel NASRI]

Dear Community Members & STM32 fans,

Let’s end 2018 thanking you for your involvement in our Community and wishing you all the best for 2019!

As already done in 2017 (https://community.st.com/s/feed/0D50X00009bLPmvSAG) and in 2018 (https://community.st.com/s/feed/0D50X00009bLSAKSA4), we open this space to hear from you.

This is an opportunity for us to evaluate what we deliver as offer and to know your expectations.

If we come back to the STM32 portfolio end of last year, it was like this:

Now the image is getting larger with new products as well as ecosystem components:

Compared to the wishes you shared previous years, we weren’t able to answer all proposals for sure, but may be some of our solutions met what you looked for. Like for example: delivering .ioc file in the STM32Cube package which we started with STM32G0...

Either you are a follower of the STM32 history as well as the Community updates, or a new member in this space, would you mind share with us your feedback answering the following 3 questions:

• What shouldn’t be done (don’t say migration to new Community platform or new CubeMX interface (because both of them will be improved)?
• What you appreciate the most as STM32 related offer?
• What do you expect/suggest related to the STM32 and its ecosystem?

All together, keep UP our STM32 Community!

[S.Ma]

STM32 chipset: In short, A kind of SmartIO matrix which would enable the possibility to digitally connect different GPIOs together. For example to connect different USARTs together, sometime as level shifter (if they are in different Vddio domains). Basic PLD features would be interesting too. For legacy purpose, such bux matrix could be placed a "Alternate 0x0F" which currently is the EVENTOUT signal. Crossing RX/TX pins, MISO/MOSI/3 wire, MC Timer XOR or 3 channels can be moved to this structure and make the base peripheral less "mutated"

[Tesla DeLorean]

SD/MMC support for DDR modes, currently no software demonstrating documented hardware capability.

Better planning/design of pin muxing on low pin count implementations.

Focus on supporting the hardware currently available, portfolio seems to be continually expanding and diverging, the software is continually in a catch-up mode and seems to have poor testing/validation regime.

Fix the forum, the data loss and frustrating functionality over multiple iterations has caused the loss of several members.

[Tesla DeLorean]

Chip level ST-LINK, ie STM32-DBG where the F103 or F723 parts preloaded with ST-LINK firmware can be purchased for providing on-board debugging to customer boards, etc.

[S.Ma]

Present Community site: Cookie system on this community not to pop up everytime, including page refresh, (android and pc) make a stay logged in option.

back button shouldn t go back to top of threads (if answering the 50th question in the list, click the back button to understand)

the top page bell notification is stuck with the same 2 notifications no matter what is done.

[Jack Peacock_2]

​I'd like to see more 32-bit timers, especially LPTIM, TIM6 and TIM7.  Although overflows can be counted in ISRs it would greatly simplify operations if there was an atomic 32-bit count.  This is especially valuable when paired with sourcing the timer clock from LSE/LSI (e.g. FreeRTOS tickless timer).

The tamper pins with the switched resistor, sampling and programmable polling work very well as wakeup sources for pushbuttons in battery powered devices, far more versatile and battery friendly compared to the WKUP pins..  The drawback is so few are available in most of the 'L0 and 'L4 packages.  I'd like to see five tamper inputs mapped to pins on most 'L4 packages, and at least three pins on most 'L0 packages.

The BLUERNG Bluetooth controllers need a lot of work to catch up to the competition.  As it stands now I can't justify using them.  If ST wants to be in the Bluetooth business look at Nordic and Silabs, then go back to the drawing board.

MEMS sensors are the future, and ST has a compelling lineup.  What I'd like to see is more intelligence offloaded to a low power MEMS (inertial, gyro, magnetic to start) so I can keep the coin battery powered device asleep as long as possible.  Fall detection is a good start, but I'd like to see more along the lines of detecting haptic motion equivalents (shaking, rotating, pointing in a specific direction), offloading a low end controller in the 'L03x or 'L05x range.

Release the old SPL libraries as community open source.  Given the current state of Cube et al. I'm not going to use it in any commercial products for the foreseeable future.  I suspect there are other commercial developers who also have their own SPL equivalents.  It would be nice if some of the duplication of work could be avoided.  ST can continue with the Cube; let the STM32 community maintain the SPLs with ST's tacit agreement on copyrights.  And no, the LL library isn't the same thing, don't pretend it's a replacement. 

If the reason to suppress the SPL is to force users onto the Cube, it begs the question of why the Cube cannot compete against a decade old SPL that isn't even being maintained.

When it comes to the forum, compared to ten years ago.....well, ST is not a software company.  As Stan Lee often ended his column, 'nuff said.

   Jack Peacock

[Pavel A.]

More love to your Ecplise IDE - Atollic. Better debugging experience.

-- pa

[saiteja]

I am new to this STM devices. I am using STM32F407 controller. one thing i really liked is its performance, speed and feature especially 32 bit timers. But in the starting stage i really struggled for initialization with keil software. If some data is there in detailed for basic initialization and usage of GPIO hal libraries it would be pretty easy for beginners. If it is already there and if i didn't find that one then ignore this comment.... Thank you and Happy New Year

[Asantos]

A high-end motor control and digital power convertion microcontroller. Using cortex-m7 or cortex-m33 + DSP accelerator. Ethernet option that don't use analog pins (GPIOA and GPIOC), only GPIOD.

2xCAN-FD

HRTIM with 270pS resolution, same as the STM32F334.

2x Quadrature encoder with index processing.

Analog comparators, each with internal 10 or 12 bits DAC.

4x 5MSPS ADC, same as the STM32F303.

[Amel NASRI]

Adding @brk​  in the loop to check these requests.