very month, semiconductor manufacturers across the globe retire old devices. A product that has been superseded, isn’t selling well, or maybe whose application has declined, is removed from the catalogue and ceases to be manufactured. Usually these moments pass unnoticed, just one old device among many. Who is going to remark upon the demise of a chip for a VGA card for example, or a long-ago-left-behind Flash memory chip?

One has come to our attention that is pretty unremarkable, but that could concern some of our readers. NXP have stopped manufacturing the LPC810M021FN8. What on earth is an LPC810M021FN8, you ask, the answer being that it appears to have been the last microcontroller with an ARM core available in a DIP package. Even that in itself is hardly earth-shattering, for if you really must use an ARM core rather than any of the myriad 8, 16, or 32 bit microcontrollers still available you can always get a DIP breakout board for a small surface mount chip.

STM32CubeProgrammer (STM32CUBEPROG) is an all-in-one multi-OS software tool for programming STM32 microcontrollers.

It provides an easy-to-use and efficient environment for reading, writing and verifying device memory through both the debug interface (JTAG and SWD) and the bootloader interface (UART and USB).

STM32CubeProgrammer offers a wide range of features to program STM32 microcontroller internal memories (such as Flash, RAM, and OTP) as well as external memories.

STM32CubeProgrammer also allows option programming and upload, programming content verification, and microcontroller programming automation through scripting.

STM32CubeProgrammer is delivered in GUI (graphical user interface) and CLI (command-line interface) versions.

Multi-OS support: Windows® , Linux® , macOS®

There’s a tremendous amount of value in using pre-built, known-good development environments. It saves you hours of potential headaches when things aren’t working. Is the bug in the hardware or the software? If you bought a dev kit, you can be pretty sure it’s your software. But sometimes using a dev kit also feels like there’s a black box in the system. [Kevin] wanted to peer inside the black box, so he ordered a tray of cheap STM32F103 chips on eBay, and did the rest himself.

“The rest” isn’t all that much, but figuring that out is half the battle. [Kevin] soldered the TQFP chip onto a breakout board, added some decoupling capacitors, and connected four pins up to a dirt-cheap ST-Link programmer clone.

A complete tutorial for using an STM32 without a dev board
http://kevincuzner.com/2016/05/22/dev-boards-where-were-going-we-wont-need-dev-boards/

Or something like that. I’m just putting together an ATMega, CC1101 module and an LCD to make a small communication device.

Hey! Why don’t I slap together an ATMega328, a CC1101 Sub-GHz module, an LCD and try to make a small modular radio system? That’s what popped into my mind one morning, when I woke up.

Details

I may see two kind of uses right now:
-Amateur Radio paging system. Because who doesn’t want a pager! Makes you feel important
Something in the lines of a one-way system (for now): a base station made of a CC1101 plus a hefty power amp broadcasts messages over 70cm band to small modules people carry around. The small receivers include an LCD and buttons to display and acknowledge the messages

-Digimodes interface: the CC1101 can transmit using 2FSK, 4FSK, GFSK, MSK, OOK and flexible ASK (as per the datasheet).I thought it would be interesting to make a small interface linking this module to a PC, and maybe add a small PA to bump up the power up to 7W (within Amateur Radio operating conditions). I never got into digimodes over UHF, this may be a chance to do so.I think non-amateurs may also use it as long as they don’t use a PA and stay in the 433MHz band.

Explore M3 is a feature rich ARM Cortex M3 development board. It can help you prototype ideas faster with Arduino and take them beyond, with bare metal programming, RTOS support and lower power modes if need be.

We are writing numerous tutorials as listed in the details section. Explore M3 will also have a opensource CIMSIS Debugger hardware, quick prototyping baseboard with numerous peripherals and a Starter kit.

More importantly, as an early backer you can get the board at $15, we will be launching a campaign on CrowdSupply soon. Do sign up with the link below, to be notified about the campaign!
https://www.crowdsupply.com/explore-embedded/explore-m3

It is reasonably easy to make a microcontroller spit out some Morse code. What makes [pavlin’s] take on this project interesting is that it resides on a tiny USB board with an ARM processor. The design for the board is available with single-sided artwork suitable for production using simple methods like toner transfer.

The STM device has a built-in USB bootloader. It can also act as a serial port, which makes the project very simple. The only external parts are a speaker and an optoisolator.

Programmable CW Morse Keyer / beacon
http://e.pavlin.si/2016/02/16/programmable-cw-morse-keyer-for-beacon/

The code is available on GitHub.
https://github.com/s54mtb/stm32projects/tree/master/projects/f0-usb-beacon

[Dave] wanted to learn more about the ARM architecture, so he started with an image of the ARMV1 die. If you’ve had some experience looking at CPU die, you can make some pretty good guesses at what parts of the chip have certain functions. [Dave], however, went further. He reverse engineered the entire ALU–about 2,200 transistors worth.

Inside the ALU of the armv1 – the first ARM microprocessor
http://daveshacks.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/inside-alu-of-armv1-first-arm.html

There seems to be a direct correlation between musicians and people who can program. Even programmers who don’t play an instrument often have a profound appreciation of music and so we see quite a few musical projects pop up. [Ihsan Kehribar’s] latest project is a good example. He married an STM32F031 ARM development board, an audio codec, and a simple op amp filter to make a playable MIDI instrument. Of course, it is hard to appreciate a music project from a picture, but if you want to listen to the results, there’s always Soundcloud.

He’d started the project using an 8-bit micro, but ran into some limitations. He switched to an STM32F031, which is a low-end ARM Cortex M0 chip.

The project has good documentation and uses an optoisolated MIDI interface. The transfer between the ARM and the CODEC uses DMA and [Ihsan] uses an interesting trick to simulate double buffering on the ARM’s DMA channel (and a good use of the “half complete” interrupt).

Polyphonic FM Synthesizer with STM32F031
http://blog.kehribar.me/build/2015/12/06/polyphonic-fm-synthesizer-with-stm32f031.html

Please note that, there is no single tone for this device. Almost every parameter is tunable on the fly.

In the future I may build a user interaface with buttons and knobs for this device but at the moment I’m just following change software – recompile – burn path for creating different sounds. Not much effective but works at the moment.

Small ARM Cortex M4 board for wearable, data logger or other projects. Board is able to program and debug other ARM Cortex devices too.

This project is about to build a small and tiny (48mm x 19mm) development board based on a Freescale Kinetis K20 device (ARM Cortex-M4 running at 48 MHz). The microcontroller pins are on the outside to use the board with a breadboard. The board includes the option for an micro SD card, 32 kHz clock and a 3.3V DC-DC converter. The ARM Cortex can be debugged with standard development tools (Eclipse, GNU, SWD).

ARM-based processors there is a legion of different development tools. Some of them are free, but in general the design size is limited in some way. Swedish Atollicin new tool package, rather than completely free.

Atomillicin True Studio Lite is completely free to download, use and distribution. Use does not even require registration.

Still, the tool corresponds to commercial C / C ++ – programming tools, Atollic praises. According to the company True Studio Lite was developed for the ARM development world would get rid of fragmentation. The market has a lot of the same types of tools that offer basic editing, compiler and debugging, but most of the usability is poor, because the tools are not integrated in any package.

True Studio Lite is based on open Aclipse platform planted with commercial tools familiar wizard tools as well as extensive support for different manufacturers of ARM-controller circuits.
Atollicilla is also a commercial package, which it sold under the name True Studio Pro.

Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3602:taysin-ilmainen-tyokalu-arm-kehitykseen&catid=13&Itemid=101