STM32 Now Features 512KB Flash

Lew Payne November 27, 2010 at 9:59am

@Yuan - Regarding the BeagleBoard... I wish they made something similar, without all the PC-centric interfaces and such. Oh, and a micro JTAG connector would be nice, too (ala OpenPilot).

Lew Payne November 27, 2010 at 9:49am

@Yuan - That's a nice little breakout board you've got there. I like a breadboard on-board, along with some basic I/O stuff (switches, indicators, etc). It makes prototyping much easier, and debugging with LED's comes in handy at times. I found that for an AHRS, MARG, IMU or INS, no RTOS is needed. But, if you start cramming other features onto the board (navigation, servo control, PPM decode/encode, etc) the RTOS makes life a lot simpler.

Before starting my project, I contacted Zik Saleeba (Flying Fox) to find out how his choices had fared. He had to drop his project, due to being hired by a company that makes UAV's, but his parting words were "look at the CORTEX line... upward migration path."

For object recognition, I'm not planning on anything fancy (at first). Thermal imaging, in the snow. Locate a cluster of pixels with a high heat signature, and take a snapshot of it (both thermal and regular). Let a human sort 'em out (was that a water pipeline, a deer, or a lost person?). Eventually, I'll try and expand it to wilderness rescue situations (lost campers, hikers, etc). We seem to get people lost in the snow here (Boise, ID) every year, so I'm starting with the more straightforward stuff.

Lew Payne November 27, 2010 at 7:02am

@Yuan - Here's my STM32 development platform. The 72MHz clock and instruction set optimizations make it a good platform for running an RTOS, such as FreeRTOS, eCOS or uC/OS-II. The STM32F103ZET6 (512K) costs around $17.00 from DigiKey. As long as you don't need floating point, or can make due with the CORDIC fixed-point library, they're great. I was looking at the CORTEX-M4 (with floating point) as well as the "A" series, but another project has me working on the TI Delfino DSP chip (with floating point). However, TI is now coming out with a dual-processor micro, which has both a DSP and CORTEX in it! That may be an ideal platform for me; the CORTEX could integrate the navigation sensors, and the DSP could be available to do image recognition as well as optical flow.

Lew Payne November 26, 2010 at 3:51pm

PS - The STM32 has had 512KB flash available for quite some time now. The announcement was specific to the "value line" series of STM chips, which comprises their most power lean series of chips. These power misers now also come in 512KB flash versions.

Lew Payne November 26, 2010 at 3:49pm

@Yuan - I concur. It's actually a pleasure coding for ARM CORTEX based chips (STM32, LPC17xx, etc), and the assortment of I/O, timers, vectored interrupts and general design is fantastic. I chose the STM32 over the LPC because of the upward (compatible) migration path that is (and will be) available... including hardware floating point, multi-core processors and even hybrids (DSP + ARM chip: e.g., TI).