Wich tool chain do you recommend?

[mariorotigni9]

Posted on June 04, 2011 at 17:35

Hi,

I am a bit confused about wich of the three toolchain choose, between the advised by ST. I have some experience in C, debugging embedded applications and toolchain but not used one in the last 5 years. I would mainly play with STM32 on sensors and some hobbistic robotics. Do someone has a table that compare the three software? I had a look to just to IAR site now and seems not so quick build a comparison. Is the 32k code limit true for all the toolchain, as it seems for IAR? thanks a lot, best regards Mario #what-tools-to-use

[Tesla DeLorean]

Posted on June 04, 2011 at 22:32

Keil and IAR only have 32KB limits if your not buying them. If you don't buy the full blown systems there are typically 256 or 512KB limit versions available too.

The Atollic Lite demo/eval is terribly crippled. No projects, No printf/scanf, No hex. Rowley is very cost effective, the personal version was pretty cheap last time I checked. This question has been asked before, at the end of the day it usually comes down to personal preference, familiarity, and corporate directive. Pick one YOU like, not because someone else does.

[Andrew Neil]

Posted on June 06, 2011 at 08:23

''Keil and IAR only have 32KB limits if your not buying them.''

  Last time I looked, IAR offer a 32K size-limited, time-unlimited version, and also a size-unlimited but time-limited version. The trouble with the free (as in beer) open-source (ie, GCC-based) tools seems to me to be that you  will have to do a lot more work yourself to gather together, assemble, and configure a complete development environment; in particular, getting a working debugger seems non-trivial... As clive1 says, this has been discussed many times before on this forum...