[ChuckMcM]

   I wonder what kinds of devices this is intended for?

This: http://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/products/evaluation-tool... ARM Cortex M-4 architecture, 800 x 480 full color display, 16MB of RAM and 16MB of flash on this demo board and the part includes a 2D bitblit unit (ST calls is ChromArt(tm)) which can do fill from constant, memory to memory region copy, memory to memory copy with alpha blend, (and all three with pixel format conversion options)

Put a keyboard and a VGA monitor on it and you've got a PC that is at least as powerful as the ones from the late 80's early 90's.

[roymurdock]

What are possible use cases for a device like this? (I didn't downvote you and I don't know why anyone would)

[kbenson]

Off the top of my head, with no experience in this field, appliance displays? E.g. a screen on your fridge. Or even the screen in your car? Touch interfaces of roughly this size are popping up everywhere.

[erichocean]

Certainly, why would you want that vs. a $5 Rapsberry Pi Zero which does have an actual GPU, media acceleration, etc., more RAM, a more powerful CPU, etc.

[yuretz]

E.g. because of much longer guaranteed support/supply life, which is a must if you are trying to run a serious production. There might be some other reasons too.

[erichocean]

> because of much longer guaranteed support/supply life

The underlying components in the Pi Zero also have a long "guaranteed" support/supply life. You don't have to rely on the Pi foundation for your components, or the board itself (as I pointed out in another reply in this thread).

My primary point is that the cost of a GPU these days is very close to zero, so I see little benefit in picking a platform that doesn't have one if you need that capability.

[akiselev]

Uhhh have you ever dealt with Broadcom? The BCM2835 chip powering the RPi zero isn't something you can buy without negotiating with Broadcom directly and a minimum order size in the tens or hundreds of thousands. That is a far cry from STM parts you can order off of Digikey or Mouser. Even some of my bigger clients won't base products on Broadcom chips for that reason alone.

And no, even in the best of cases where you have great software support from the vendor (ha! as if) and a great reference design, adding a GPU to a design is expensive because of both software and hardware R&D. unless you have an integrated CPU/GPU combo but then you're back to the problem of dealing with Qualcomm/Broadcom.

[jamiesonbecker]

Raspberry Pi Zero's seem to be hanging out with Sasquatch and Nessie these days.. that is, if they really exist at all and aren't just one of those myths, like the one about Elon Musk being an actual human.

[startling]

Because you are designing hardware with certain requirements that may not be fully met by a consumer device.

[erichocean]

If you are "designing hardware", you can use the same underlying components as the Pi Zero, and we already know the cost at scale is comically low.

[anmorgan]

The main thing that is usually overlooked is that Raspberry Pi is a charity and they do not make commercial products with the intent to make money from it.

Well okay, why would you make the choice to go with something like the STM32F4 ARM Cortext-M processor vs something like the Raspberry PI with an ARM Cortex-A series processor? Well I'm glad you asked.

First you need to ask, what does your device need? Some things to consider: - Power consumption - Real time sensors or I/O - Safety critical - Processing / Computing power - Image / Video processing - < 10" display - > 10" display - etc

All of these are at the beginning of making a choice of which processor series you want to use.

But, wait if an Cortex-A Series can be sold for $5 why don't I just got with an Cortex-A series, because, well they aren't. See my first sentence and now my following.

If you compare the higher-end M4/M7 processors from ST (STM32F4xx / STM32F7xx with Chrom-ART / DMA2D Support) vs something like the NXP/Freescale A9 single core (i.MX6Solo) at quantity 1,000, you're looking at between $7-$10 for the Cortex-M4 and $13-$15 for a Cortext-A9.

( http://www.digikey.com/product-search/en/integrated-circuits... )

( http://www.nxp.com/products/microcontrollers-and-processors/... )

Okay, so they aren't that much different in price (depending on who you are and how much the rest of your system costs). So, you need to then compare it even further. Typically on a Cortex-M Series you are looking at an RTOS, whereas on a Cortex-A series you are looking at a real OS (Linux, Android, Windows, etc). Why does this matter? This has to do with hardware support and the core difference between an RTOS and an OS. If your board processor, peripherals, etc are not well supported or you are doing a custom pcb design, you are going to be writing your own drivers which equates to NRE (Non-recurring Engineering), which can be expensive. This cost could be consumed by the company as a business expense or be captured back into the cost of the device. Then you have tool chains, support, and familiarity, and so on.

So, if the above did it's job, that might have helped into understanding why you may or may not go with a Cortex-M or Cortex-A series. And yes you may be right on the edge of going with one or the other.

[derefr]

Add a digitizer to it and it'd work well as a "soft keyboard" (visual modal button grid) on POS terminals et al.

These would also work well for bottom-dollar thin-client hardware operating over the core X11 or VNC protocol (i.e. rects + pixbuf texture handles.)

[ChuckMcM]

Anything that needs a rich graphical interface and a simple programming model? I've seen these things in things like digital signs, kiosks, etc.