[robomartin]

Nice! Thanks for the direct communication BTW.

I guess you are very serious about competing with industrial MCU’s.

We had to use a 2040 shortly after it came out because it was impossible to get STM32’s. Our customer accepted the compromise provided we replaced all the boards (nearly 1000) with STM32 boards as soon as the supply chain normalized.

I hope to also learn that you now have proper support for development under Windows. Back then your support engineers were somewhat hostile towards Windows-based development (just learn Linux, etc.). The problem I don’t think they understood was that it wasn’t a case of not knowing Linux (using Unix before Linux existed). A product isn’t just the code inside a small embedded MCU. The other elements that comprise the full product design are just as important, if not more. Because of this and other reasons, it can make sense to unify development under a single platform. I can’t store and maintain VM’s for 10 years because one of the 200 chips in the design does not have good support for Windows, where all the other tools live.

Anyhow, I explained this to your engineers a few years ago. Not sure they understood.

I have a project that I could fit these new chips into, so long as we don’t have to turn our workflow upside down to do it.

Thanks again.

[ebenupton]

It's a fair comment. Give our VSCode extension a go: the aspiration is to provide uniform developer experience across Linux, Windows, and MacOS.

[robomartin]

I will when I get a break. I'll bring-up our old RP2040 project and see what has changed.

I remember we had to use either VSC or PyCharm (can't remember which) in conjunction with Thonny to get a workable process. Again, it has been a few years and we switched the product to STM32, forgive me if I don't recall details. I think the issue was that debug communications did not work unless we used Thonny (which nobody was interested in touching for anything other than a downloader).

BTW, that project used MicroPython. That did not go very well. We had to replace portions of the code with ARM assembler for performance reasons, we simply could not get efficient communications with MicroPython.

Thanks again. Very much a fan. I mentored our local FRC robotics high school team for a few years. Lots of learning by the kids using your products. Incredibly valuable.