Arduino for STM32

Just4Fun wrote: ↑Tue Oct 04, 2022 5:17 pm It seems they are making an Arduino core for the W801 available!!!

See here.

Thank you for that link. I have W806 board that was waiting more than a year in the box
Blinking leds works !

The most impressive thing about the w801 chip is code density. A minimum implementation (gpio, ticks and uart) is 3kb.

A comparable implement on a pic32 is 13kb, and 7kb on a CM3 chip.

The closet I have ever come close to that 3kb figure was on a pic24.

I managed to shrink an empty main() to about <550 bytes compiled -> mostly irq tables, *under the stock sdk*.

so i'm changing my strategy, by re-porting my baremetal implementation to the sdk. so that it can be compiled under the sdk, yet no bloat.

i'm constantly amazed at c-sky's code density.

A quick progress report.

This is a very love it or hate it kind of china. Very bipolar, and extreme and exceptional.

Goods:
1. Specs are through the roof. This should be a 20usd chip.
2. Simplicity: this is a 32bit chip with 8bit chips peripherals. A few registers later you are up and running.
3. Some interesting peripherals - 16bit adc plus pga... Rtc oscillator calibration
4. Code density. A (minimalist) Arduino implementation goes (barely) under 2kb.

Bass
1. Piss poor documentation and conflicting documents and code. How many uarts does the w801 have?
2. Terribly software - written poorly.
3. Bonehead hardware designs: why do you need to pool uart interrupts. Or the timer interrupts?...

Overall I think it is more of a micro processor than a controller.

Still fun chip to play with.

Code is up and running both bare metal and on top of the sdk.

Workflow perfected. Click a button and it will compile and download so the chips.

btw, does anyone know of a good serial monitor that allows user selectble RTS settings? the typical serial monitors seem to reset the chip via rts - which in this case prevents the chip from running.

The only one I have found so far is XCOM but it is in chinese.

i've been using putty (in linux)
https://www.putty.org/
but that it doesn't seemed very feature rich (at least in linux)

to toggle DTR/RTS signals, i think those are literally 'usb' signals (i.e. usb cdc acm)
I think stm32loader does that from within python, using (pyserial), I think.
i think stm32loader 'ab'uses DTR/RTS signals to toggle reset and boot0, that saves having to toggle it manually.

Most serial comms, including putty, don't allow the user to toggle rts.

XCOM is the only one I found so far. But in Chinese. To be far, I haven't tried extensively either.

try python?
https://github.com/pyserial/pyserial
https://github.com/pyserial/pyserial/bl ... initerm.py

stm32loader seemed to be using it
https://github.com/jsnyder/stm32loader

that requires me to install python on my computer. too lazy for that.

I wrote my w801 journey here, if anyone is interested: https://dannyelectronics.wordpress.com/ ... mpression/

I got gpio, uart, timer, pwm working. pmu has been a struggle so far. adc/i2c/spi/touch sensing on my to do list.

Some pluses and minuses, as I mentioned earlier. More geared towards the pico crowd.