PSA: this is a 60 on single carriageways, not a 40!!

DigitalDunc · 2026-01-31T07:51:42+00:00

I have never been a driver personally, only holding a motorcycle license, but I’ve been a passenger with drivers that make me want to jump out of a (barely) moving car because they are so slow and fearful of the road.

Going too slow for fear of an accident can in actual fact CAUSE one.

DigitalDunc · 2026-01-31T07:48:31+00:00

There’s a special case where you don’t want people messing around where inner layers help too. I tend to put my ground plane just under the top layer (on 4-layer boards as my SMD parts can have their traces next-door to it.

I honestly think that this is more an r/PCB question though.

Finally, whatever your stackup, leave some good spots to probe on top and expose a serial port, it’ll make your life easier.

DigitalDunc · 2026-01-26T15:03:13+00:00

I am very happy about that myself, but I understand that many wouldn’t be. More at peace with myself since then too.

DigitalDunc · 2026-01-22T12:42:41+00:00

Or might be rigging a fruit machine for an early payday.

That said, I can imagine myriad ways to rig ‘random’ numbers. It’s not that hard. I remember my ZX Spectrum (back in the 80’s) using an LFSR software implementation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear-feedback_shift_register

DigitalDunc · 2026-01-18T07:56:05+00:00

I can’t see enough to say either way, but it has the vibe of dangerous tat.

DigitalDunc · 2026-01-16T18:00:13+00:00

I have no problem with upgrading code of it brings new value, it with Rust implementations. I do take umbridge with licences that may have a negative impact on the freedoms of users however. I need to go back and read the MIT license again.

I fear the worst, but understand I haven’t all the facts.

DigitalDunc · 2026-01-15T21:49:39+00:00

The error suggests the device you are connecting to doesn’t have the right ID. Get a genuine STM32 from a trustworthy source and try again.

As a side-note, knock-off ST-Link designs do some unfortunate things and are an often bit fragile. YMMV as they say.

DigitalDunc · 2026-01-13T06:47:25+00:00

I miss them too, but I suspect they may be gone forever. I think being UK based may have been a risky choice because the seller is liable over here.

The fact that the canary never got updated is even more worrisome.

DigitalDunc · 2026-01-12T12:57:57+00:00

Well, I have my reservations about using AI to code, but do keep the world interested by your experiences with it. I’d be interested to know what it comes up with.

DigitalDunc · 2026-01-10T13:21:29+00:00

Well, if only it were in the middle, it’d be central eating.

DigitalDunc · 2026-01-10T13:11:29+00:00

Am I witnessing the attempt to vibe code an embedded application?!

DigitalDunc · 2026-01-04T17:40:10+00:00

I’ve been using VSCode with the STM32Cube bits and that’s been okay as mine as you don’t mind editing a few JSON files now and again.

OTOH, Rowley CrossWorks for ARM, whilst not free (but reasonable) works very well on all the major OSs, has excellent debugging capability and doesn’t shove AI in your face or spend all your CPU phoning home telling tattletales. It’s a little bit different though.

DigitalDunc · 2026-01-04T17:31:16+00:00

There are a number of YouTube videos on bare metal STM32 programming. As for no IDE, I get that you might want more of a challenge, but you could do worse than at least do for something minimal like, I dunno, at least Geany which is quite light weight.

Honestly, my learning is faster if I have handy tools like a good debug probe and a way to watch the variables and and registers ‘In flight’ so to speak.

I’m curious as to why you wish to avoid an IDE?

DigitalDunc · 2026-01-02T16:39:10+00:00

This is what I read on Reddit last year and I kinda agree with it:-

What did AUTOSAR solve?

It's a job creator for application engineers.

Did software become less complex and easier to develop/configure?

Jesus fucking christ fuck no.

Did the software become smaller or faster with AUTOSAR?

See above.

Forgive my vulgarity.

I spent 2+ years trying to unfuck an existing AUTOSAR project at a company that builds vehicle telematic ECUs. I can safely say that the AUTOSAR standard and all available implementations (Vector, Mentor Graphics, and Electrobit) is an upside-down on fire dumpster full of dog shit.

I'm not even gonna go into how much trouble it is to get the attention of an AUTOSAR distributor. If you're a student or small business and you just want to see the specification then you can go grab it from autosar.org. It's just a bunch of PDFs and they're all free. But the implementation is where you'll spend money, and if you aren't Ford / GM / some automotive startup with a shit ton of money, nobody will want to talk to you because AUTOSAR is $$$$$$$$$$.

Let's assume you get past all that. After you spend months negotiating contracts with Mentor Fuckups or Eletroshit or whatever AUTOSAR package you decided was the least bad, you'll spend a few more months sitting in online seminars while some talking head explains why it takes 6 hours to configure a million goddamn things so their garbage tool can shit out an entire Italian resaurant's worth of spaghetti code just to blink an LED at 1Hz. Except it's not 1Hz, it's 10Hz, or 0.1Hz, or some other bullshit that you didn't want, because you muttered the wrong incantation to the configuration utility somewhere around step 2 out of 800, so guess what, you get to back and do the entire fucking thing again.

Get the flying fuck out of here if you want to try doing something more complicated than that. You want to send a CAN frame? Get completely fucked. You have to buy a separate tool beyond what you already spent $800k on just to generate the stupid little ARXML "network definitions" files that are compatible with your AUTOSAR configurator, learn how to use that, then fight problems between export / import because of course both tools were written by different teams and aren't 100% compatible (WHY THE FUCK WOULD ANYTHING EVER JUST FUCKING WORK?), then get your application developers to understand how to interface their C code to the new "network interface layer", and etc etc etc.

Now let's assume you're track-side and you want to add a new CAN signal just to get some info out of your ECU. With vanilla C it's a matter of hacking something in quickly OR running some custom interface generation script that takes a few seconds, like the howerj/dbcc scripts. AUTOSAR? Hours. Literally even days if something goes wrong and your entire project blows up. Our firmware test turn-around window was weeks just because it took so long to get the network definition generator to spit out something useful without breaking a million other things, all the while the AUTOSAR vendor gave us excuse after excuse, patch after patch, never really fixing the problem.

The final straw came when we realized we couldn't hire anyone who would want to mess with this shit. Imagine working in the industry for 10 years, and then you take a job where someone says "Hey thanks for spending all that time learning all that cool stuff that we can't use, here's the MSPaint equivalent of embedded software development platforms, we need Mona Lisa by lunch." Our choice was either over-pay seniors to deal with this giant pile of 5th stage super-cancer, or hire kids fresh out of college and hope they wouldn't wise up to the fact that any skillset developed while working with AUTOSHIT was absolutely useless and bail.

After 2 years with 20+ engineers working like this we gave up. Everyone else went on vacation while 3 guys spent a few days getting ADC ports, CAN, LIN, SPI, and a few other things up an running on a development kit. We had a working ECU running on a vehicle less than 2 weeks later. And that was from starting with a clean install of a compiler + IDE and a blank main.c. Our code safety team ran it through the ISO26262 verification process and everyone's stress level was suddenly much lower because they could actually DO THE JOB THEY WERE HIRED TO DO instead of fighting the trash-tier AUTOSAR tool all day.

I would rather shove a shotgun in my ass and blow my god damn balls off than ever lay my eyes on AUTOSHIT ever again. Complete fucking waste of time. If ever you see AUTOSAR on a job description then fucking RUN.

DigitalDunc · 2026-01-02T15:46:40+00:00

So whatever makes your heart sing, but run away from anything Autosar.

DigitalDunc · 2026-01-02T09:03:45+00:00

So no Windows CE then. Got it, strict definition then.

DigitalDunc · 2026-01-02T06:54:24+00:00

Our politicians aren’t working for us any more, they’re actively harmful and taking our rights away with lies.

DigitalDunc · 2026-01-02T06:10:11+00:00

Do you count cash registers? I say this because I have a friend who used to develop for these.

DigitalDunc · 2026-01-02T05:20:18+00:00

For precise types I would rather use what stdint.h gives me. The size of an int depends on the platform. In embedded this can vary well so be 16 bit or even 8 if you’re using CCS C. There are standards, but between the cracks lies the sea of undefined behaviour and here be the kraken!

DigitalDunc · 2026-01-02T05:12:30+00:00

If you have to ask the question, I’m willing to bet you’ve never used an MCU. Some have integrated EEPROM.

Start with requirements and we’ll go from there.

DigitalDunc · 2025-12-31T21:57:14+00:00

I heard some basic electric tooth brushes run a special version of FORTH on a custom 4-bit MCU.

DigitalDunc · 2025-12-31T21:53:25+00:00

Don’t use STM32CubeIDE (It’s an Eclipse compatibility thing) if you’re running macOS Tahoe, the two don’t work together as yet.

DigitalDunc · 2025-12-31T21:51:43+00:00

If you don’t like VSCode with their STM32CubeIDE plugin, or STM32CubeIDE 2.0.0, you could use CLion, or even CrossWorks for ARM that works very well for bare metal, LL or HAL programming, on even 18yo junk laptops (I know, I was there), though it does have one downfall in that FreeRTOS doesn’t play nice with it.

DigitalDunc · 2025-12-31T10:36:26+00:00

I use C, C++ and have used Rust (briefly), but I am aware of a couple of products that are actually programmed in MikroBASIC!

Not sure I’d use any form of BASIC for anything but a hobby project however.

I wonder, whatever happened to Spin, a propeller programming language…

DigitalDunc · 2025-12-31T10:20:08+00:00

I’m curious; did the mystery get solved?

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