One commonly known microcontroller is the SAMD21 series manufactured by Atmel/Microchip, popularized by Adafruit in their CircuitPython line of boards.įor ST Microelectronics, the STM32 line is their main 32-bit microcontroller line, and they were one of the first few to adopt the ARM microprocessor in their designs, meaning that the STM32 chips have been around for some time. The ARM core is a design that is licensed out to manufacturers, so there are quite a number of manufacturers producing ARM chips. Theoretically, once you learn the architecture of ARM core, there is nothing stopping you from moving up and down the chain, which makes it very attractive to learn, since it can be applied to such a wide latitude of chips. The next step up is the ARM core, it is a 32-bit microprocessor in everything from the tiniest microcontroller to phones and laptops. This is an 8-bit AVR microcontroller that is mostly limited to the microcontroller world. Think Arduino, and what you have is an ATMEGA328P. No more twiddling and configuring to get Eclipse to work as a STM32 IDE! To me, this is a signal to jump into STM32 chips.

This is great as there is finally one official IDE that ST provides, which means dedicated support for STM32 chips and boards. This is part of same series of cores that you see in the ubiquitous SAMD21 development boards.

The STM32 line is a 32-bit microcontroller line from ST Microelectronics utilizing the ARM Core. Recently, ST Microelectronics bought Atollic and released TrueStudio as a free Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for their STM32 line. It is essentially the same as Atollic TrueStudio with proper STM32CubeMX integration. UPDATE : ST just integrated Atollic into their CubeMX branding, and it is now known as STM32CubeIDE.

9 min read Tldr I really like the STM32 and you should definitely give it a whirl.

Atollic truestudio stm32 tutorial