Hello,
I am new to ARM microcontrollers. I have planned to buy STM32 discovery kits from STMicroelectronics. I need to know which IDE is the best for this purpose. I also need to know if there is any book on ARM microcontrollers for beginners that could give me a kick start. Can anyone suggest me something ?
I have previously worked on PIC18F, PIC16F on CCS C Compiler.
Any help would be appreciated.
Hi,
Thanks for your question.
For a quick introduction to Cortex-M microcontrollers, check out these two papers:
Navigating the Cortex Maze
ARMv6-M vs ARMv7-M - Unpacking the Microcontrollers
If you look here...
Streamlining the migration to an ARM processor based platform
...you'll find pointers to a series of migrations guides. One of them focuses on migrating got ARM from PIC so you should find that useful.
I see that Christopher Seidel has already pointed you at the huge range of tools available for programming Cortex-M microcontrollers. Of course, I would recommend that you download the free evaluation version of the Keil Microcontroller Developer Kit and give it a try! It supports the STM32 family very well.
Hope this helps.
Chris
Hello Muhibraza,
first, let me answer the question about the books. On this page: Microprocessor Systems/Applications Textbooks for Educator… - ARM you will find a lot of interesting books that can help you with learning more about ARM based microprocessors.
As for the IDE this is not so easy. There are a lot of them out there: Keil, IAR, Atollic, etc. For these three you will find user manuals at STMicroelectronics that help you in getting started quickly. Keil MDK fully supports the STM32 family will software packs. If you want to know more, check out www.keil.com/dd2, and www.keil.com/boards2.
Kind regards,
Christopher
Without claiming to be the absolute best, if you are interested in an Eclipse based open source solution, you can also consider the GNU ARM Eclipse plug-ins project, it provides ready to run templates for most STM32Fx devices.
I know I'm a little late but I'd like to precise for future readers that KEIL is an exellent IDE but it's limited to 32KB of code for the free version!
It's true that lot of stm32 exemples are given as KEIL project so it's ideal for beginners.
All the same, I'd like to recommend CoIDE which is entirely free and it's based on GCC toolchain. Easy to use and friendly user and open source... Do not use the latest version (bugs)!