Forum participation by ST

[Tesla DeLorean]

Posted on October 01, 2012 at 16:10

Would it be possible for ST, it's technical staff, or FAE's to participate in this forum in a more meaningful way?

#evertdekker.com

[Andrew Neil]

Posted on October 05, 2012 at 08:33

''

We cannot compete with CLIVE...'' Why on earth not??!

[frankmeyer9]

Posted on October 05, 2012 at 10:08

''

We cannot compete with CLIVE...'' Why on earth not??! Indeed, why not ? You are THE ONE who should be able to compete. You are sitting at the source, to coin a term of my native language. I guess you rather want not to compete. You think the time of your engineers is better spent supporting already paying costumers... That might be comprehensible, but a little short sighted IMHO. I might be an amateur concerning ARM Cortex, but not generally by profession. My company still uses lots of PIC18, which are structural crap - but the service is excellent. By not participating in this forum, you not only make a certain impression to students, but also to interested commercial developers, which are bound to other vendors at the moment. There seems to be a lot of those people in this forum, and I'm not sure if that ''ST doesn't care'' impression this makes, is going to boost sales in the future.

[root]

Posted on October 05, 2012 at 10:28

There is no competition with Clive ... he is someone ultra knowledgeable about the STM32, but he don't have some informations you have at ST.

That's multiple WEEKS I'm trying to get support from ST, opened a ticket on the website (why the hell is there the possibility to open a technical ticket if you d'ont reply anyway ?????), etc. There is NO WAY to get ANY SUPPORT from ST. I guess if I was selling 1000x more units you would come and clean my shoes for me, asking if I don't need anything. That's just bullshit ... I'm ''only'' in the 10k/100k chips/year so I don't deserve any support ? STM32 are powerful processors, with plenty of peripherals, and lower price ... but if I can't get them to work as they should, they are useless, period. Now just because you don't do your support job, I have to start again a whole project, going back to a microchip pic instead of a STM32F0 ... yes, that sucks, but at least I know with Microchip I can rely on the datasheet, the last 2 years I lost weeks and weeks of development and tons of money because of crap USB stack from ST, because of crap documentation from ST, because of wrong datasheet from ST, etc, etc, etc. That really is a pity.

[Palitsky.Gennady]

Posted on October 06, 2012 at 07:09

One of the ways to address the problem is to present it in front of the competitors.

Example - discussions and round tables at Embedded Systems Conferences. Sometimes it works. I'll try to do it next year in San Jose.   

[andyturk]

Posted on October 06, 2012 at 07:54

One really can't blame ST for their participation--or lack thereof--here. It's entirely their choice. Fortunately for newbies like me, there are people (amateurs? professionals?) who take the time to help others in public forums.

But wouldn't it be better to be using a more capable forum site (e.g., Google Groups) for unsponsored support? The forum software is really painful here. It seems like ST wouldn't care one way or the other.

[Andrew Neil]

Posted on October 07, 2012 at 23:12

''The forum software is really painful here''

Indeed''It seems like ST wouldn't care one way or the other'' On the contrary - ST are very touchy about criticism of the forum software! Post have been deleted, and accusations of ''unacceptable use'' have been made...

[fullcaos]

Posted on October 08, 2012 at 01:19

more active participation by the ST team certainly help those who want to learn this kind of MUC! 

[toantq3]

Posted on October 08, 2012 at 04:00

Yes, I agreed with all friends. We need for ST support. Something, I don't understand but I cannot findout the answer from forum.

[nick239955]

Posted on October 08, 2012 at 12:28

Here's a note from one of the inept amateurs - 8 months ago I didn't have much idea what the difference is between a volt and an ampere, I've never had to work with electronics before, I do computer programming for a living. 

However thanks to several people I respect a lot (including Clive) I've managed to understand and learn the basics, design some boards (even if they're not perfect, but then again what is?), integrate ST micros and write all the code required by my application. Had it not been for these guys, Clive too, I wouldn't have been able to get so far. I'm not sure ST can ever repay Clive for the all the work he is doing here but I'm positive all of us on this forum could use some assistance from ST sooner or later because after all we don't pay the ST products we use with beans and IOU's.On a side note, it's not the first time I see (across different industries I might say) big companies not giving a rat's back-end about the small timers such as myself and maybe a few others that commented above and/or in other threads... For instance, my R&D budget so far was in the low towards mid 5 figure range, about 25% went into ST dev boards, tools and micros, so really who cares about this kind of figures when you have several blue chip clients that probably net you 5000 times more than that per year? It's just the nature of the universe.

[Daniel Squires]

Posted on August 12, 2015 at 13:42 HA! I haven't used these forums a great deal but I had assumed you (Clive), were STs support staff!, by your numerous helpfull answers to many threads. Then I see a thread which makes it clear you are not! I wouldn't be surprised if any staff at ST whose job it is to provide support quit long ago due to how appalling this forum SW is. I found it seems to work a bit better in Firefox in that it chucks less errors, but still, its awful. Common ST, where are your support staff? I don't think I've seen a single post from them.