[Catbert59]

> Most of the stuff I did was 15 years ago.I remember, Espressif really disrupted the market.

They still are.

No vendor until now was able to push out microcontrollers with a solid Wifi integration. Sometimes you can find weird 2-chip-solutions.

I still wonder why ST doesn't bring one. That device would be a multi-billion-business.

[05]

ST are overpriced, no self respecting internet of shit vendor would be caught dead using their MCUs when cheap clones exist.

[Catbert59]

Most clones aren't even close compatible to their originals.

Maybe some basic stuff like usart, i2c works fine. But the the deeper you dig into the specialties the more you will have problems.

And STM32s and expensive? Maybe if you buy them from Digikey or Mouser. With the right distributor they are dirt cheap.

[05]

Lots of horror stories from people who had to respin their boards because you couldn't buy ST at any price when they redirected all their output to car manufacturers during the chip shortage. They may be cheaper now but vendor lock-in never helped anyone (except that vendor) in the long run. Oh, and most Chinese wifi gadgets use Beken nowadays because it's even cheaper than Espressif, what are the chances of them switching to a more expensive chipset instead?

[Catbert59]

We never had problems as a small vendor with ST during the chip crisis and all distributors honored our delivery contracts. Even most big companies don't deal with ST directly when it comes to the last mile.

Porting stuff to another microcontroller would be easy as we are not using too proprietary features... as long the uC has SPI/I2C and a bunch of timers the embedded developers will be happy. Thanks to Zephyr.

[05]

> Thanks to Zephyr.

That only gets you proper support for a couple vendors (Nordic, ST), everything else is a nightmare. Even with better-supported vendors, there are whole swaths of things that aren't properly supported and you need to directly call code from underlying vendor SDK to make things work. That bodge makes the whole project non-portable. Even some simple things like ADC DMA on ST F1 series..

[Catbert59]

Can't share your experience.

Sometimes stuff is missing. But that's implemented and upstreamed quickly.

[estimator7292]

ST doesn't want to make one because then you can do OTA firmware updates without their special $60 usb to serial adapter that won't work for non-st parts

[Catbert59]

All of the newer STM32s have ROM-bootloaders that support UART- or even USB-flash.

For SWD you can one of the ST-Link clones or the free open implementations of it.

[estimator7292]

Except when they don't. Last time I tried an ST part, I specifically bought one that advertised UART bootloader.

It didn't. Every piece of documentation I could find said that it did, but it would never respond. Forums were full of people complaining about this problem for years with no response from ST. No datasheet or marketing update, no errata. You just get a useless chip and it's your problem now. They also never responded to any of my direct emails or messages.

Every time I've tried an ST part, it's been hell and I eventually gave up and used an Atmel part instead. Every time.

[Catbert59]

Please name the device.