When hardware manufacturers make GUI code-generation tools, the resulting files often look like a canned-spaghetti truck overturned on the highway — there’s metaphorical overcooked noodles and red sauce all over the place. Sometimes we think they’re doing this willfully to tie you into their IDE. Not so the newest version of ST’s graphical STM32CubeMX, which guides you through a pleasant pin-allocation procedure and then dumps out, as of the latest version, a clean Makefile.
Yes, that’s right. This is a manufacturer software suite that outputs something you can actually use with whatever editor, GUI, compiler, or environment that you wish — even the command line. Before this release, you had to go through a hacky but functional script to get a Makefile out of the CubeMX. Now there’s official support for real hackers. Thanks, ST!
If you’re compiling on your own, you’ll need to update the BINPATH variable to point to your compiler. (We use the excellent GNU ARM Embedded Toolchain ourselves, which is super-easy to install on almost any Linux.) If you want to use STM32CubeMX with the Eclipse IDE, [kali prasad yadav] sent us PDF instructions — it’s not hard.
If you doubt that the availability of a free, open, and non-constraining toolchain can matter for a silicon vendor, we’d point to AVR and the Arduino platform that spun off of their support of GCC. Sure, Atmel still pushes their all-in-one wonder, Atmel Studio, which is better than the Arduino IDE by most any metric. But Studio is closed, and Arduino is open. We’d love to see the number of Studio users compared with Arduino users.
Congratulations to ST for taking a big step in the right, open-toolchain, direction.
Filed under: Microcontrollers, news
No comments:
Post a Comment