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by Catbert59 295 days ago
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.
1 comments
05 294 days ago
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?
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Catbert59 294 days ago
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.

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05 294 days ago
> 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..

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Catbert59 294 days ago
Can't share your experience.

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

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