SparkFun Electronics Forum

Hello,

With the Maple Microcontoller having reached End-of-Life early last year, are there any good comparable boards that are available?

There are a large variety of similar development boards available all with more or less features. To identify 'comparable' boards we would need to know which particular features of the Maple boards you interested in:

Arduino shield connectivity?
Cortex-M3 microcontroller?
STM32 Microcontroller?
Price range (limits)?
Available peripherals (which)?
Flash / RAM capacity?
Anything else?
etc. etc.

Maybe you could rate each feature as must have / should have / could have / not interested?

Has to be an ARM Microcontroller, that is easy to use and program, but will also allow me to program it at the lower levels (not assembly, but c and c++ without all the gimics that Arduino can provide). I also would like to have it in a price range that is less than $30.

It will also need to have at least the same number as I/O pins broken out as the maple does.

Female Headers or breadboard compatibility is also a must.

teensy 3 may work.

freescale arm, arduino user level, but maybe programmable via c as well. check with pjrc.com

I think this is it: https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/gcc.html

Teensy is interesting, but I wander if anyone here has had any experience programming it in C and could share that experience.

What about C++?

I dunno, I have a couple I could practice with. The examples are C.
I've only used the arduino part, never had a need for doing it in C++.

Is all your current code in C++?
On such a small device, C++ only uses up space, but thats my opinion, I haven't tested it.

Thats the beauty of using arduino, the code is portable across parts (if similar enough).

After thinking and looking the Maple (retired) products from SF, why not just get the chips and toolchain if you programmed it at the low level?

The Maple SW and HW were both claimed to be OPEN, so get all the data from them. Spin your own boards and never look back. STM32 are still being made.

Otherwise recode at the arduino level and don't be a slave to HW changes.

The problem is, I do not have the funds or the time to create my own mate. But still need to be able to program with C/C++.

I may have mistakenly identified C as C++, could you PM me some of the examples you have?

I don't think I have anything beyond the link given above for the teensy part. He only has a example blinky.c
I'll look when I get home.

The STM32 F104 discovery board has a site with lots of examples. Also a google search turned up a STM32 arduino list.
STM32 is non trivial to learn and use at the C level. Looks to be a few chinese STM32F107 clones out there.

What do you think of the Nucleo Boards? What is the difference other than Arduino Comparability and Form Factor?

Do you know of any C tutorials for ARM?

info
Teensy: https://forum.pjrc.com/forum.php
Maple reborn sorta: http://www.stm32duino.com/

C for the ARM is nontrivial. You have 2 routes, pay a LOT of $$$ for a commercial toolkit such as Keil, Renaissance, etc.
Or try a free toolkit, and wade thru tons of online hints, most of which will be sorta out of date and not applicable until you get something working. This could take you weeks. Now I did this about 5 years ago so things may have changed.
Also doing toolchains and crosscompilers is my day job, so I knew how to do all the ugly under the hood stuff to get codesourcery+stm32 free stuff to work.

A quick google search 'stm32 programming' turns up a 100 different things now.
The stm32 Discovery boards have links to tools, you could search that.

I see mikroe.com has a stm32 compiler for $299, I have used their PIC tools 5-8years ago to good effect. Glad to see them still working on tools.

If you do all this, you will come to appreciate the magic of(and hard work put into) arduino.

Eclipse + GCC works fine on Windows, OSX & Linux. Best of all, it's free and totally open world. Have a look at this blog to get started. http://embeddedsoftdev.blogspot.ca/p/eclipse.html

motopic wrote:C for the ARM is nontrivial. You have 2 routes, pay a LOT of $$$ for a commercial toolkit such as Keil, Renaissance, etc.

I see mikroe.com has a stm32 compiler for $299, I have used their PIC tools 5-8years ago to good effect. Glad to see them still working on tools.

mikroE's IDE only supports a very small subset of the ARM ecosystem, namely STM32 and TI's TIVA MCUs. And no RTOS, Graphics package etc.

There is a 3rd alternative CrossWorks for ARM. You can get a personal, non-commercial license for $150 or a Developer License for $1,500. Support for just about every ARM made today.