Posted on October 06, 2014 at 23:26I think that those ''makers and hobbiests'' of now are the ''very large customer purchases'' in the future. To see at ''makers and hobbiests'' in this way is a narrow view. What about all the educational institutes?
What about them? They should focus on teaching, and getting that right. The semiconductor business is a business, it's lately about making things to order and 18-month and shrinking life cycles. The industry is playing the short game, not the long game. Funding something/someone that ''might'' have some payback in the future is not the reality here, the ST dev guys presumably want to be paid today, and that's presumably funded by a few people buying millions of devices, not carrying millions of people buying a few devices. Supporting a large number of people, regardless of how noble they may be, is very expensive and time consuming to the people providing the support. It's also very tiresome doing ''Groundhog Day'' repeating the BLINKY LED and USART app over and over.
If you learn micro-processors properly at school, the MIPS, ARM, SPARC are all much of the same, and you'll likely have to adapt to whatever your employer or customer has chosen, or invested in anyway.
Focusing on STM32 parts is way to narrow to base a career on. Learning a ''monkey presses the button'' code generator is likely to get you replaced by the monkey.
