F4 or F3 board with ext. RAM and SD ?

[Ozone]

Does anybody know a board with a STM32F4 of F3 with the following features:

• external RAM, 1 MByte or more
• SD card interface, alternatively Debug port with VCP or ethernet interface

A display would be optional.

Had been looking at the usual suspects (ST, Olimex, Waveshare, Sparkfun, Mikroe), but didn't find anything appropriate.

I prefer a MCU with SPL code available, which limits the selection to the F1, F2, F3 and F4 series.

The (non-commercial) application should do burst collection of analog data, and transfer it to PC or store it right away.

[Ozone]

Thanks, I will keep this board in mind. Albeit I hesitate to touch ebay.

[Ozone]

Actually, I haven't followed NXP's eval board strategy lately. But it looks like they want to catch up on high-end eval boards.

They used have quite a large selection of smaller MCUs + boards, often quite customer-specific.

I had some encounters with NXP FAEs in my last company, that was more mass market oriented.

I personally found the peripherals of the LPC less complex, easy to understand, and easy to work with.

[berendi]

> Checked some DISCO boards recently (including similar F7 ones) at the distributor's pages (Farnell, Digikey, Mouser), and none is currently available.

Check them again, they have apparently managed to stock up some F469I-Disco.

> the LL code is quite a disappointment. Especially in regard to documentation and examples. The effort is basically the same as with direct register access.

It is register access, every single register field is wrapped into an inline function, nothing more.

The effort is not the same, but much worse, because you have to look up the function definition every time, then sometimes the parameter macro definition too, to arrive at the proper register name which can be at last looked up in the reference manual.

I find the examples in the reference manual quite usable. I just have to turn every step into a register write instruction, and they work. There are no complete projects though that I can just import as-is and start tweaking.

[Ozone]

> It is register access, every single register field is wrapped into an inline function, nothing more.

> The effort is not the same, but much worse, because you have to look up the function definition every time, then sometimes the parameter macro definition too, to arrive at the proper register name which can be at last looked up in the reference manual.

Exactly - only with some occasional bugs ...

There seems no contextual documentation, just the function parameters and return values.

And no examples wich demonstrate sequences like initialization and operation of a peripheral.

What good is a library when I need to consult the reference manual anyway, and for every step ?

At the moment, I'm unwilling to sit hours and days to debug code almost the same I did years ago with the SPL, and runs on several "older" cores.

OTOH, tried the NXP framework yesterday.

The free toolchain (MCUexpresso) is Eclipse-based as well, not quite to my liking.

But you can build individual frameworks (SDKs) online with just the components you need (FatFS, lwip, emWin, etc.), or download pre-generated full SDKs. I got a individual DSK, and selected one example that built out of the box.

Inspecting the source code structure, I could confirm what I expected from the configurability.

There is very little interrelation and interdependence between separate packages, making it easier to work with.

The framework does not grab as many resources, nor enforce a scheme. And no ubiquitous busy-wait functions ...