STM acquires Atollic

victor_pv
Thu Dec 14, 2017 3:13 pm
Just read this now, STM acquires Atollic:
http://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/abo … c2839.html

Rick Kimball
Thu Dec 14, 2017 3:52 pm
I like this part:

Michel Buffa, Microcontroller Division General Manager, STMicroelectronics. “That position, and working closely with Atollic for many years as a top Gold Partner, has shown us the professional features and value TrueSTUDIO has delivered to demanding developers and will soon give STM32 developers a major competitive advantage with the availability of the STM32 TrueSTUDIO IDE for free.”


Just4Fun
Thu Dec 14, 2017 5:47 pm
Christmas Gift… ? :lol:

I’ve never used it, but I think that now it’s a good “investment” starting to study it… :mrgreen:


zmemw16
Thu Dec 14, 2017 7:30 pm
i followed the free and unregistered links, followed a couple of routes in to pull the linux version.
both require name, country, an email and a few minor details.
usual disclaimer for details usage is displayed.
stephen

RogerClark
Thu Dec 14, 2017 8:12 pm
I thought True Studio was already free.

Perhaps it wasn’t free for commercial use.

On a similar vein, Segger now allow their Embedded Studio IDE, to be used by Nordic Semi users, completely free, even for commericial. I imagine this will start to hurt Kiel


sheepdoll
Thu Dec 14, 2017 9:02 pm
I gave a lecture last week at ESC (Embedded systems conference.) It was combined with a biotech conference as none of the foundries were there this year. (Intel was promoting Alexa, and I never did get to the Renascence(Hitachi) booth.)
Most of the Booths on the ESC side were promoting “security solutions.” Others were showing off cloud based data storage systems. Only IAR was there. No Keil, No segger, No Green Mountain.

It could be that Design Con is in January, Arm Tech con and PCB west were a few months back.

On the Bio med side it was mostly injection molding companies and metal stampers. All looking for big fat contracts.

The lectures, however, were quite good. One of the keynotes was essentially on “Uploading” showing how robots neral nets were programmed from scans of a worm, The robot took on the behavior of the worm without training. A more sophisticated robot behaved like a small animal, although that one was trained.

My own talk was on the last hour of the last day, and followed the popular “Mars ate my spacecraft.” So it was sparsely attended. My topic was “Upgrading Legacy systems.” Where I showed an 8051 project I converted to the Arduino IDE so it could be connected to IoT. I brought my small pipe organ which attracted some attention. Even I had to leave immediate following my talk.

Guess I was right when I joked that the companies I was most interested in seeing “were too busy acquiring each other.”


RogerClark
Thu Dec 14, 2017 10:07 pm
[sheepdoll – Thu Dec 14, 2017 9:02 pm] –
Guess I was right when I joked that the companies I was most interested in seeing “were too busy acquiring each other.”

Yep. acquisitions seem to be flavour of the month.

Just like Autodesk bought Eagle (and ruined it for everyone by changing the license and requiring a login to use it)


zmemw16
Thu Dec 14, 2017 10:18 pm
[RogerClark – Thu Dec 14, 2017 8:12 pm] –

On a similar vein, Segger now allow their Embedded Studio IDE, to be used by Nordic Semi users, completely free, even for commericial. I imagine this will start to hurt Kiel

they’re showing an Arm version and linux64 ! nothing regarding a Nordic limitation.

<OT> istr that udev uses its rule files in alphabetic sequence and exits its search on first match, correct ?
<OT> Atollic: fired ide up and clicked Welcome, got a message about MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME not being set.
anyone remember when they last used mozilla by typing mozilla<ret> ? :lol:
curiously firefox still stores its config in dot mozilla dot firefox

stephen


RogerClark
Thu Dec 14, 2017 11:59 pm
The license on Segger Embedded Studio was a bit vague

I went to a Nordic Semi, one say seminar, earlier this year, and at that time Nordic told the audience that they could use Segger Embedded Studio to do all but the final build, as that it was OK with Seggers license to do all the dev with it, but not to actually release a product.
They said that the final build could be done using gcc and a Makefile

However when I queried this with the Nordic support forum, it became clear that this was true, and the license only allowed “evaluation” of Segger Embedded Studio (for free).

But Nordic seem to have come to an agreement with Segger, as there is now a popup which you have to agree to only use it for Nordic products (nRF51 and nRF52), in which case its fine for commercial use.

I suspect the use of Segger Embedded Studio for other devices e.g. STM is subject to the “evaluation” clause in the license, but that Segger don’t make it very clear… As its not limited in any way (unlike Keil, which has a 32k binary file size limit on their evaluation version)

I’ve no idea what will happen to Keil or IAR.

IAR seem to have a niche with processors based on the 8051, as there doesnt seem to be a version of GCC which supports these 8 bit processors


ag123
Sat Dec 16, 2017 3:16 am
[sheepdoll – Thu Dec 14, 2017 9:02 pm] –
My own talk was on the last hour of the last day, and followed the popular “Mars ate my spacecraft.” So it was sparsely attended. My topic was “Upgrading Legacy systems.” Where I showed an 8051 project I converted to the Arduino IDE so it could be connected to IoT. I brought my small pipe organ which attracted some attention. Even I had to leave immediate following my talk.

perhaps the class would be filled with attendees running out of seats if the topic been changed to “IOT:Arduino on 8051” :lol:


sheepdoll
Sat Dec 16, 2017 6:39 am
[ag123 – Sat Dec 16, 2017 3:16 am] –
perhaps the class would be filled with attendees running out of seats if the topic been changed to “IOT:Arduino on 8051” :lol:

I recall that there was an 8051 GCC, back when I was programming 8051 17 or so years ago. Actually I looked it up, it was called SDCC. The code was not too efficient and we went with the Kiel system as it supported the ST PSD that contained flash and SRAM.

It did not help that the ST PSDs were already pretty much EOL by the time I inherited the project. Ironically Some of the flash chips used to store the programs on were made by Atmel.

Supposedly the costs are cheaper to use the 8051, However the BOM on these boards is about 35USD compared to around 5USD for the mega328 version using off the shelf SD cards for the flash.


ag123
Sat Dec 16, 2017 11:17 am
actually 8051 (clones) is still loitering around as (rather) cheap *bluetooth LE* dongles :lol:
http://www.ti.com/product/CC2541
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=cc2541&_sacat=0

and incidentally as well a new fad for sdcc seem to be the stm8s-duino, it seem pretty hot here :)
viewtopic.php?f=52&t=2682#p35538


RogerClark
Sat Dec 16, 2017 8:28 pm
[ag123 – Sat Dec 16, 2017 11:17 am] –
actually 8051 (clones) is still loitering around as (rather) cheap *bluetooth LE* dongles :lol:
http://www.ti.com/product/CC2541
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=cc2541&_sacat=0

and incidentally as well a new fad for sdcc seem to be the stm8s-duino, it seem pretty hot here :)
viewtopic.php?f=52&t=2682#p35538

I noticed TI use the 8051 in the CC2540 and CC2541, and presumed that use of the 8051 Inside custom MCUs was probably quite common.

The problem with the CC254x BLE MCUs is that TI only released their BLE libraries in binary form, for the IAR compiler
So it’s not possible to build using any other compiler, and as IAR costs $$$.

So the small companies I know that we’re getting into BLE devices, went for the Nordic nRF5x devices instead, as Nordic support Gcc, as well as IAR and Kiel toolchains.

I have not looked at the state of play at Nordic for several months, but as Segger Embedde Studio, is now totally free for Nordic Semi nRF5x users, I susoect that Nordic may move their focus so that SES may become their primary supported IDE, rather Kiel.
IAR was seldom used by anyone posting to the Nordic community forms.


ag123
Sun Dec 17, 2017 3:37 am
agreed the cc254x is pretty much a propriety bluetooth le stack from ti and that ti basically designed the cc2541 based on a 8051 cpu core.
i doubt there would be much room for user codes even if we choose to add things in cc2541

and yup the Nordics bluetooth le soc e.g. nrf51822 is pretty much a better choice among which at least Nordic provided a ‘soft bluetooth stack’ which may be integrated with user codes.

i think ti do have competitive products such as cc2640 that is arm cortex m3 based but it seemed they are pricier compared to say nrf51822 based on the module prices sold on ebay.

it seemed that the manufacturers are increasingly bundling an ide for developers as a competitive strategy


Rick Kimball
Mon Dec 18, 2017 7:11 pm
After reading this announcement, I downloaded the “Lite” version of TrueStudio to get an idea what it includes. In lightning speed, I got a followup email from one of their sales people. I sent him a response and asked what they are actually going to offer for free for the STM32 platform. Here is the response I received:

“Rick,

Future releases of TrueSTUDIO will be STM32-centric. In those releases there will be no distinction between Lite and Pro. The released version will be free for all STM32 developers.

Hope this helps.”


RogerClark
Mon Dec 18, 2017 8:12 pm
I just checked the details between the Lite and Pro version, and it seems to be enhanced debugger support ( probably tools they have written to analyse the data from GDB

From what ai can remember, the Lite version has a fully functional debug system, e.g. all the normal debug features, lile variable inspection, strack track, breakpoints.
So I dont know if having access to the Pro features would make any difference for 99% of the time.

I have not checked the full licence legalese, but the headline bullet points seem to suggest there were no restrictions for commercial use.


dannyf
Tue Dec 19, 2017 3:37 pm
I haven’t used atolkics ide. I would suspect that post the acquisition it’s support for non-st chips would be limited. So maybe time to download a copy now.

Personally I’m a huge fan of coide – I thought it’s project setup is top notch. Keil attempted to copy it via rte but didn’t get it done right – I’m still running 4.7 because of rte in 5.x

Only if st had acquired coide.

On the flip side seggers ide is top notch, if a little bit unconventional.


dannyf
Tue Dec 19, 2017 3:43 pm
On the topic of Arduino on 8051. It is totally doable – trivial to do actually.

The question is which chips to do it on, as there are simply too many different 8051 chips.


michael_l
Tue Jan 16, 2018 3:58 pm
Seems the TrueStudio download is available ?

https://atollic.com/resources/download/


Rick Kimball
Thu Jan 18, 2018 4:59 pm
I had tried out the 8.1 lite version before and ran into all kinds of hiccups. In fact I never even finished the install. With this latest version 9.0, all the license crap is gone. Installation was a breeze and it just ran without hassle. For the linux version they suggest Ubunut 16.04 LTS, which just happens to be the version I run.

I wonder what this will mean for the long term for the Ac6 effort (System Workbench for STM32) ?


stevestrong
Thu Jan 18, 2018 6:02 pm
Just installed V9.0.0 and got an Atollic-titled Eclipse :)

zmemw16
Thu Jan 18, 2018 10:10 pm
have a look inside your <home> dot eclipse directory if using linux or equivalent
i was looking to see if i needed to back it up, as i’ve had eclipse based programs clobber it or at least appear to.
one of my reasons for rebuilding arduino with a version specific naming for dot slash dot arduino15 dir
also installing to <home> installs in <home>/opt, not quite what i was expecting
stephen

paksoft
Sat Jan 20, 2018 7:23 am
Is Atollic IDE support C++ core like STM32 core?
Have anyone used STM32 core in Atollic IDE?

pak


fpiSTM
Sat Jan 20, 2018 8:49 am
[zmemw16 – Thu Jan 18, 2018 10:10 pm] –
have a look inside your <home> dot eclipse directory if using linux or equivalent
i was looking to see if i needed to back it up, as i’ve had eclipse based programs clobber it or at least appear to.
one of my reasons for rebuilding arduino with a version specific naming for dot slash dot arduino15 dir
also installing to <home> installs in <home>/opt, not quite what i was expecting
stephen

Just a tips: you can create a “portable” folder in the root folder of Arduino IDE to make it standalone. All user files will go in this directory. useful for several Arduino installations to avoid using the same user folder in <user local>/.arduino15


zmemw16
Sat Jan 20, 2018 12:20 pm
@fpiSTM
my only user is stephen, so portable is not likely to assist me.
i have or did have multiple ide versions installed, 1.8.1 1.8.2 etc, they each use(used) $(HOME) slash dot arduino15 etc
my installation(s) is in my home directory, i do do root, but not a lot :o
it’s a change in two lines and the only one i do.

i was mithering on about assorted eclipse based products that used dot eclipse in a similar fashion mangling everything installed and that i’ve finally noticed it now creates sub-dir’s for different products or maybe the people writing said products noticed that issue.

stephen


dannyf
Sun Jan 21, 2018 12:07 am
I would suspect that post the acquisition it’s support for non-st chips would be limited. So maybe time to download a copy now.

9.0 supports only STM chips now. Also it will include SPL by default. Didn’t see any option to select which modules of the SPL to be included in.

CoIDE was superb in that department. Too bad they died a tragic death.


dannyf
Sun Jan 21, 2018 12:08 am
are older versions of Atollic still available for download?

lewiss66
Wed Apr 11, 2018 7:00 am
It seems that Atollic is growing among ST community:
https://atollic.com/truestudio/

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *