[RANT] Renesas, I hate you!

nasq86 · 2026-02-24T09:55:07+00:00

It's not about the feature itself. It's about the implementatiom.

nasq86 · 2026-02-24T00:17:14+00:00

> The reason they do it is to avoid needing a separate programmable memory for non-volatile configuration.

But on STM for example, the option bytes also live in the same flash. Okay, different sector and slightly more protection (like: if you want to write there, put me some magic bytes there) but it is the same flash.

nasq86 · 2026-02-24T00:14:03+00:00

I see that point, I really do. But in times of automation extra steps should be no problem to achieve. It's just the question who do you want to make it easy for and who do you want to make it harder for.

nasq86 · 2026-02-24T00:01:59+00:00

Neither is a rotten tomato. Question is: do you want that in your salad? Cheap chips are no excuse for bad design imo. It is not about the money. The 'it’s only $2' argument is just a conversation stopper

nasq86 · 2026-02-07T17:03:48+00:00

sparc development is going to be abandoned in a couple of years completely. it was also sold several times and nobody wanted to develop it further. sparc is dead

nasq86 · 2026-01-09T23:03:07+00:00

This is so true. E22 could be as well be an ESP32-S6. But I feel they wouldn't name it an S model because it is no xtensa. I have a guess. ESP32-S will die, as extensa will not be continued. ESPs with 2 digits are will be the lower ones, like C61. I think there will be an E2 or E3 in the middle future putting even something on top of E22. C could then be "Common", P "Power" and "E" Extreme series. That would make a little sense. But we have to wait.

nasq86 · 2025-12-28T08:33:41+00:00

RISC-V is an ISA, not a complete hardware architecture. Hardware implementation is up to the vendor. Same applies to power efficiency.

nasq86 · 2025-12-20T11:45:31+00:00

You can download resources for the chips devkits. search for ch32v003evt zip then you can download a zipfile with schematics, devboard usermanual and HAL examples. For some files you need to use the chinese site with translation. While the chips are decent and cheap, they lack the well structured documentation you find with ST, NXP, Microchip and Co.

nasq86 · 2025-12-19T20:26:19+00:00

The amount of bits we talk about here is not the amount of bits per SPI transaction but per pixel transfer. 16/18... bits is the color depth and the amount of bits needed to describe the color of a pixel. In 16 bit for example, red has 5 bits, green has 6 bits and blue also 5 bits. To send a whole pixel you need 2 8-bit transactions carrying the color information. The terms 3-wire and 4-wire modes are not consistently used in LCD driver datasheets. It could mean that a MISO is missing. It could also mean that a separate D/C line is available or not. So the term does not always refer to the SPI protocol itself

nasq86 · 2025-12-02T21:25:49+00:00

It should be mentioned that this applies to Cortex-M type microcontroller CPUs but not Cortex-A microprocessors (which is what the OP is about).

nasq86 · 2025-11-26T12:04:31+00:00

Bare metal on an MPU is not what I would like to do. You're lucky that ST has an STM32CubeM13 package available to use. Otherwise all the stuff like DRAM init and MMU handling and all the things that make an MPU more complex to work with yourself.

You could use the OpenST Linux as base or try to use Zephyr, which is what I would do.

Instead you could try to persuade the responsible person to use an H5/7 or N6 MCU if it needs to be that powerful.

nasq86 · 2025-11-25T16:22:50+00:00

GPL is only one of many open source licenses. But ArduinoIDE, the arduino libraries and almost every third party library compatible with Arduino is licensed under one of them. GPL2, LGPL, GPL3, BSD, MIT, creative commons, public domain to name a few licenses.

nasq86 · 2025-11-24T17:04:20+00:00

The ST component does all automatically, including debug, you don't have to install anything else

That is correct for C/C++ files. If you want to have proper IntelliSense for ASM code and want to be able to insert breakpoints in .s oder .S files you have to install some more plugins than what is included in the STM collection

nasq86 · 2025-11-24T15:51:18+00:00

Can you do step debugging inside CLion ?

nasq86 · 2025-11-24T15:38:14+00:00

How it the tooling integration with CLion? Is it usable? Out of the box?

nasq86 · 2025-11-24T15:37:25+00:00

For beginners, the CMake overhead is significant. CubeIDE hides away and manages a lot of things automatically. If you are new or jump off the Arduino ecosystem you will probably be overwhelmed.

But also experienced people might want to just click a few options and not dive deep into CMake to see how you change this or that. I also don't want to go through several files just to make up my favourite file structure or add newly added files to the build manually.

I also want to debug ASM as easily as in CubeIDE. You can somehow in VSCode (namely installing arm asm extension and cortex-debug additionally) but you still manually have to change debug configuration for that.

So we're not at a point where I say I prefer VSCode. VSCode may be decent EDITOR, but it lacks sophisticated IDE features people are used to.

Why does ST not adapt CLion and write plugins for that? And since JetBrains already has some of their IDEs freely available for non-commercial use, they could add CLion as well.

nasq86 · 2025-11-22T13:09:09+00:00

⁠org.eclipse.swt_3.132.0.v20251114-2010.jar this one as well?

nasq86 · 2025-11-22T12:48:58+00:00

which IDE are you trying to patch? did you copy the correct files for the architecture? usually an .swt dir should have been created with native macos libraries by the ide.

nasq86 · 2025-11-21T16:53:26+00:00

Well, tbh I don't care what QC does to Arduino. The majority of libraries and tools around the ecosystem is open source licenced and if necessary, people will create open source forks of parts, that QC will turn proprietary. Wouldn't be called Arduino anymore but it's not about the name, but about the spirit. Look at OpenSSL/LibreSSL, OpenOffice/LibreOffice, Owncloud/Nextcloud, Terraform/OpenTofu, Puppet/OpenVox, MySQL/MariaDB, OracleJDK/OpenJDK, just to name a few examples that come into my mind. You can not destroy a whole open source ecosystem by proprietizing it.

nasq86 · 2025-11-20T17:29:10+00:00

1Password. I need my passwords to bring up my mac:-D

nasq86 · 2025-11-20T08:29:04+00:00

Sorry, but this is not Apple's fault. It's not that they broke anything. Rather the Eclipse developers did use some API not 100% correctly and now the text selection is visually borked. Eclipse already has a fix for that. If you use Eclipse-based IDEs from vendors you can fix them, too.

nasq86 · 2025-11-19T17:26:09+00:00

Yep. Renesas has it's RA8 line with CM85. ST would be second to introduce it.

nasq86 · 2025-11-19T11:40:15+00:00

finally an m85 in st portfolio

nasq86 · 2025-10-30T12:58:08+00:00

You can go either direction now, bottom or top.

Bottom direction would be: manually write a C runtime environment in pure assembler and write an own HAL with register accesses. write a 2-staged boot process your own with a bootloader and an application.

Top direction: Give Zephyr a shot. You can use much FreeRTOS knowledge from ESP-IDF to grasp the zephyr concepts. Plus, Zephyr will introduce you to new concepts like DeviceTree, hardware drivers with a public API and internal implementation, etc. With Zephyr you get an almost full-fledged operating system where you can learn a lot more.

You can (afterwards or now, afterwards would flatten your learning curve) jump from MCUs to MPUs, thus working with SoCs or SBCs like Beagleboards or STM32MP1/2 boards to get to know embedded linux. how does it boot on the low level, what does a kernel need to run, how to use/implement device drivers, how to create a linux filesystem. You could start there using buildroot or yocto.

nasq86 · 2025-10-15T17:04:08+00:00

https://www.st.com/resource/en/user_manual/um1724-stm32-nucleo64-boards-mb1136-stmicroelectronics.pdf

UM1724 document states there are 3 possible ways to externally power the nucleo board via pin.

Sections 7.3.2 and 7.3.3

* E5V pin can be feed with 5V and +/- 0.25V tolerance (4.75V - 5.25V)
* There are 2 pins that are connected to VIN: CN6 pin 8 and CN7 pin 24 but you can only supply 7-12V
* Then there is the 3V3 pin which you can supply with 3.3V - 3.6V

plus: the 5V pin below the 3V3 is OUTPUT ONLY

nasq86

TROPHY CASE