Hi. This is some open feedback on the use of the STM8 tools for a pending project. We are 35 year old OEM design house and about to deploy the STM8S001J3 onto a consumer space product. The assembled PCBs have arrived and now the code development was initiated on Friday.
1) The tools are horrible along with the documentation. Faced a very miserable experience and has taken an estimated 4-5 hours to get a working blinky for the low cost 8 pin SO8 breakout board from ST.
2) Is there any QC on the s/w left at ST? Any staff still working to improve the out of the box experience?
Try the following with a newbie:
Take a fresh kit and using IAR, try to get the LED blinky working from the supplied source code. Note the time it takes to get this all working.
3) We have chased countless articles on the STM8S, read assorted 3rd party website tutorials which btw told us about a bug in the ST tools that allowed us to have a working solution.
Given that we invested 1 month of 7 days a week, 8-10 hours per day to offer to the public a working solution of your broken TouchGFX, not surprised about this experience.
Get it together ST as this is just plain poor engineering. We have developed with EFM8 (and also corrected their many countless bugs about the programming protocol - which to this day they still fail to understand that the Cygnal to Silabs team must have been high while writing the rebranded documentation). At least with EFM8, we could have finished our custom code in less than an hour.
Hoping we will save some coins in the long run but have many offshore suppliers who sell all of the STM8/STM32 CPUs at a fraction of published prices so that is our light at the end of this horrible tunnel.
Would be very surprised if you see growth of these parts unless someone steps up to answer the countless open Q&A postings on this forum.
