STM8

[pfk3]

I recently came across these STM8L051F3 dev boards on Ali Express:

https://www.aliexpress.com/i/4000295896534.html

For that price I figured I'd order a few (I bought 4) and they arrived from China to the US in a few days. Very fast. Then once they arrived I went online to try to figure out a non-Windows IDE that I could use to write some code for them. That lead me here. I installed Sduino in my Arduino IDE but this particular board isn't in the list of boards.

So I'm hoping to get more info on how to get the board definition for this particular board to Sduino so that I would see it in my Tools menu:

Tools->Board->STM8L Boards-> STM8L051F3P6 Development Board

There are some other interesting boards on Ali Express, some for under $1, so I agree with Leif that if supported by any IDE like the Arduino IDE, the STM8 series of ICs & dev boards could grow into a larger community. There are a ton of potential projects which can work just fine with a small breadboard and a tiny STM8 dev board like these.

Here are some of the other boards:

https://www.aliexpress.com/i/4000996539208.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/i/4000459676209.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/i/4001035290432.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/i/1005001700821304.html

I'm happy to order some and test them to get them added to Sduino, I just don't know how to add board definitions to the Sduino project.

[dannyf]

i'm a big fan of those little beasts: stm8s003 and stm32f030. but the 8s has limited utility as an arduino clone - as the space is quite limited, especially if you compile with a free compiler. under iar, they work wonders.

[ag123]

i've got 2 pieces of these, originally i'm thinking of using them as stepper controllers

off topic, there are these mx1508 h bridges (pretty low costs)
https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?ca ... ext=mx1508
https://github.com/Saeterncj/MX1508
https://sales.dzsc.com/486222.html
https://arduinodiy.wordpress.com/2019/1 ... ver-board/

i've worked them on the regular stm32 (e.g. f103) driving 28byj48 motors hacked to work as bipolar steppers
https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?ca ... xt=28byj48
they worked well paring up with stm32 and mx1508

but as h-bridges consume gpio 4 pins each, 2 h-bridges takes 8 pins. so when one is running out of pins on the 'main' mcu boards, these little mcus may help. One stm8s can possibly drive 2 set of h-bridges. but these days ready made stepper controller ICs are more convenient
https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?ca ... Text=a4988
https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?ca ... xt=drv8825

i still like the idea of using separate h-bridges as h-bridges tend to run hot. hence they still remain valid where the context permits them.
another thing about separating the controller logic from the h-bridges means that one can implement different control schemes and possibly use feedback

however, as stm32f103 boards are relatively inexpensive these days, it is pretty possible to use stm32f103 in the same way as stepper controllers.
just that it'd seem to be 'wasting transistors'. the good thing with stm32f103 is its usb, so i'd guess it can be made into a pc host driven 'stepper driver'

[MrMark]

For reference, I ported the "Microcontroller I/O & ADC Benchmarks" sketch to Sduino and get the following results:

STM8 Minimum Development Board (STM8S103F3P6/16 MHz) using Arduino IDE 1.8.2 and Sduino STM8 plain C core (non-C++) version 0.4.0

Code: Select all

Generic STM8S103 breakout board (STM8S103F3P6/16 MHz) I/O Speed Tests Over 50000 Iterations.
Digital Pin Write Takes About 6.50 Microseconds.
Digital Pin Read  Takes About 6.71 Microseconds.
Analogue Pin Read Takes About 16.34 Microseconds.

[dannyf]

so at 16Mhz, that's like 100 instructions per read/write?

that's excessively inefficient, in my view.