Good bye, STM-8?

elijah · ‎2013-04-26

Posted on April 27, 2013 at 08:19

Just received a letter from Raisonance(aka KEOLAB). They changed their license policy. Their 32kb-limited compiler isn't free anymore. It costs (TADAAAM!!) 700 euro per computer. The only alternative is cosmic compiler, which is 32kb-limited too, and has 1 year time limit.

All that crap means there will be NO open-source projects, NO hobbyists(like me) who use STM8 chips.

Looks like these guys pushed us back to 80th, dark world without any open software, to astronomical prices for MCU tools.

It's pity, I liked these processors, I liked discovery boards, but I'm forced to migrate all my projects to AVR or ARM chips. I'll spent all my stm8 chips and I'm not going to buy them anymore.

Good bye, sweet prince.

#compilers #open-source #stm8

johnjohn9107 · ‎2013-09-04

Posted on September 04, 2013 at 11:35

I sympathise. The chip and software companies have lost sight of the fact that the hobyists and small companies are the big guys of tomorrow. Technical support is virtually non existent... that's why we have to rely on forums like this.

In the old days the tech' rep' would come round with a couple of real manuals, a demo board and show you how to get it all up and runing. Now theres a several week learning curve and loads of garbled C code keeping you so far away from the hardware we have no idea what's going on.

Del

Philipp Krause · ‎2013-11-26

Posted on November 26, 2013 at 18:28

Just use another compiler. Maybe try sdcc, at least that one can't just be taken away.

Philipp