STM32 MCU Developer Zone on st.com

[waclawek.jan]

STM32 MCU Developer Zone on ST's main webpage:

Discuss.

JW

[Tesla DeLorean]

Now if only they had chips to sell? And communicated better with the customers they already had?

Honestly the portfolio of STM32 has become unmanageably large, with an exponential commitment to provide into another decade.

The real problem is that you're going to get entire designs decamp into other parts, and companies are forced to refactor into other solutions, and will look to reduce size and cost, and improve availability and second-sourcing.

[Nikita91]

Everything for STM32 developers, in one place.

Except the chips. This may not be the time to make such a statement... It could be taken as provocation.

On the other hand they talk about development, not production.

It is true that the proliferation of references has been worrying me for some time. The tendency to do many chips with little difference does not seem viable in the long term. Maybe it's time for ST to clean up the catalog by dropping references, since they won't be available for a few years anyway.

For the circuits to come some techniques are possible to reduce the costs and the number of references while keeping the versatility.

[Tesla DeLorean]

Well in "olden times" the route to progress was achieved by strong/actual pin-for-pin compatibility, and a relatively painless path to porting/migrating the software which is easier to change than physical boards, manufacture/test equipment and other supporting hardware.

Along such a path you could a) cull older designs, b) encourage migration, c) make promises you could keep over form-fit-and-function, and d) have product life-cycles more closely matched with support/design team longevity. And that's not 10-20 years, with staffing an order of magnitude shorter.

[Nikita91]

I have just consulted more deeply this page, and I must say that beyond the first impression, from a marketing point of view it is brilliant.

We realize that ST really offers a lot of things. And sometimes with good choices like Atollic (now CubeIDE) or Microsoft Azure RTOS, we can hope that one day the peripherals are well supported (Ethernet, USB...) by a professional software team.

[Tesla DeLorean]

As I mentioned in another thread, STUPENDOUSLY VAST amounts of marketing dollars are thrown at getting small business, makers, hobbyist, students to the table, making low cost development boards, on buying tool-chains, and magic software generation tools, but sales/distribution only wants to catch whales.

Someone at HQ needs to unplug the HAL-9000 and figure out what the goals are, because at the moment players on the same team are at opposite ends of the field, kicking at different targets.

[Nikita91]

Are distributors like Farnell, Mouser, DigiKey whales? At the moment they are not catching them... Yet they are the suppliers of small businesses, hobbyists, makers. Indeed ST does not take care of this market, despite its marketing.

In my company we use µC, but not much (we went from AVR Mega and XMega to STM32). I'm sure that all over the world there are millions of these companies, and that in the end it represents a large diffuse turnover.

Indeed I agree, the marketing is good, but the sales are not going in the same direction (I'm sure that ST produces at high speed, but has chosen its customers).

And maybe one day there will be surpluses at very low prices! For survivors.