I wanted to share some of the insight I’ve got over the past couple weeks. Our group has selected the STM32F7 as our microprocessor for our project. We were looking for something reasonably cheap, as close to bare metal as possible (no OS), for audio DSP. The STM version of the ARM cortex m7 we got is the STM32F746 on this discovery board.
It is reasonably priced at $50 and comes with many peripherals and the drivers for them. This board isn’t supported by Platform.io (another good resource) so programming it with all of ST’s HAL (hardware abstraction layer) drivers was a little daunting at first. The moral of the story is I tried ARM’s Keil uVision IDE as well as an eclipse plugin to program and flash the board. ARM’s Keil uVision was fairly easy to setup but their lite version of the IDE only lets you compile and link 32kB projects. This is unfortunate because the professional version costs $1500/year for a license. Eclipse surely works but I had many issues trying to get the environment setup.
The setup we ended up going with is using visualgdb with visual studio.
While it’s not free they have a 30 day free trail and at $50 with the academic discount is much more affordable than ARM-MDK.
This tutorial is very straight forward compared to setting up eclipse.
