Posted on July 11, 2011 at 20:14Thanks for the confirmation of my suspicion. It is sad, because having a compact MCU with accurate timekeeping support is essential for efficient wireless sensor network devices. Fortunately, the 48-pin package DOES have the RTC crystal support, so not all is lost.
NOTE: In fact, I switched from NXP LPC1300/LPC1700 series to STM32 as my preferred platform purely because the LPC1300 did not have RTC support, to wake the device up from sleep. I made the switch even after acquiring dozens of LPC1000 dev boards and learning the platform, writing my own peripheral support libraries, etc., so it was a difficult decision to switch to STM32. I find the LPC1300 peripherals much more logical in some ways than STM32... why does STM32 insist on splitting 32-bit peripheral registers into two 16-bit registers that must be accessed separately?!
In case you're curious why I reject the LPC1700 as well: the STM32 RTC is superior to the LPC1700 RTC because the STM32F10x RTC allows subsecond precision through timer clock division control. On the LPC1700, the RTC only provides 1-second precision, making the RTC useless for precision timekeeping.
