Tutorial on Carmine Noviello

Getting started with STM32F746G-DISCO

Mon, 13 Jul 2015 05:06:56 +0000

ST Microelectronics recently expanded its portfolio of STM32 microcontrollers with the new STM32F7 family. These are the new best-in-class MCUs from ST, with a Cortex-M7 core able to run up to 216Mhz (future releases will run up to 400Mhz with 2000 CoreMark index), with an internal flash up to 1Mb and 360Kb of RAM. STM32F7 is also able to run from external flash memory without performance penalty, thanks to a L1 cache (this is probably the most interesting aspect of these MCUs). STM32F7 are targeted for High-end embedded applications, especially to multimedia ones, and I think that it’s far from low-budget applications and hobbyist uses. At the time of writing, these MCUs are quite pricy, ranging from 12€ to 20€/pcs for low-volume orders. This is definitely a really high price, especially if you consider that you can find around Cortex-A7 MCUs for less than 10€. But I think that the price will be dramatically reduced in the future.

Build STM32 applications with Eclipse, GCC and STM32Cube

Thu, 04 Jun 2015 14:13:18 +0000

If you landed to this page, you probably already know that I’ve covered this topic in the past. I showed in a series made of three posts how to successfully setup a complete Eclipse/GCC ARM tool-chain to develop applications for the STM32Nucleo-F4 developing board. Since then, many people have reported me positive feedback on that tutorial. But, some of them had serious troubles in getting those instructions working for other STM32 families (F0, F1 and so on). This was mainly caused by the GNU ARM Eclipse plug-in, or rather by the included templates in the plug-in. When a new project is created using the plug-in wizard, a template is used depending on processor family. Unfortunately, the plug-in author has updated just the template for STM32-F4 family to the more recently STM32Cube-F4 HAL framework from ST (which still supports only commercial IDE…..), leaving the other templates still based on the old Standard Peripheral Library, which is no longer supported by ST and STM32CubeMX tool used in my tutorial. *This causes my instructions to be wrong for processor families different from STM32-F4. *

BlueNRG shield for STM32 Nucleo

Sun, 08 Mar 2015 15:32:51 +0000

I recently received during a ST training day a sample of the X-NUCLEO-IDB04A1 shield. This shield is based on the BlueNRG network processor from ST and it allows to create Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) applications using an Arduino compatible developing board. Obviously, ST designed the software for this shield to be used mainly with its Nucleo range of developing boards. In fact, all necessary libraries and examples needed to use this shield are designed to run on Nucleo-L0 and Nucleo-F4 boards using their respective HAL. However, ST still doesn’t provide official support to free GCC/Eclipse toolchains (an this is a pity…), and it’s a little bit tricky to use ST demo files and BlueNRG HAL without using a commercial IDE supported by ST (IAR, TrueSTUDIO, etc).

Unicode in 5 minuti

Tue, 20 May 2008 15:18:12 +0000

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ggi giorno nessun programmatore può ignorare Unicode: con la diffusione di Internet e la pubblicazione dei contenuti via web è diventato impossibile non conoscere questo sistema di caratteri e, grazie al fatto che sono sempre di più i linguaggi di programmazione che lo trattano in maniera nativa, è diventato molto semplice poterlo adoperare nelle proprie applicazioni. Sicuro??!?!

A leggere in giro nella rete sembrerebbe esattamente il contrario. Praticamente tutti i giorni si legge di programmatori disperati che non sanno come trattare stringhe di testo contenenti caratteri Unicode, e spesso le soluzioni trovate sono alquanto naïf e sbagliate. Insomma, lo Unicode è per mia esperienza la bestia nera degli informatici del nuovo millennio, nonostante il web sia pieno di ottimi tutorial molto completi per approfondire la materia.
E forse è proprio questo il nocciolo della questione: le guide, i tutorial, gli howto elaborati per i vari linguaggi di programmazione spesso sono troppo completi ed esaustivi. Per carità, lungi da voler criticare il lavoro svolto da altre persone, ma per mia esperienza personale in questo tema più si tiene basso il livello e meglio si comprende qual è esattamente il problema. Per poi successivamente magari approfondire tutti i dettagli per gli amanti della storia dell’informatica.