New ‘746 Cortex M7 Nucleo Board

The F7 Discovery launched in the summer was perhaps to pricey for some, and a bit too cluttered with stuff for others,

Here’s a much cheaper 746 platform in STM’s Nucleo series from Mouser. About £16 in UK US$24

http://www.mouser.co.uk/ProductDetail/S … bCISK7k%3d

Notable feature is on board ethernet.

Ken

Marketing PDF showing chip flavors, flash + SRAM and other details:
http://www.st.com/st-web-ui/static/acti … tm32f7.pdf

But…
why?
Is anyone in this forum requiring this level of sophistication? Resources? What is the use case?
Would anyone here seriously attempt to write an Arduino core for this board? $23 U.S.D. sounds great especially when a Teensy 3.x is $19, but I’m just trying to understand… where does something like this fit in the world of microcontrollers – seems like the lines between the uC and mC get blurred constantly and products such as the rPi and Pi0 continue to blur the entry level of the microcomputer and boards such as this one raise the upper level of microcontroller.

Ray

F7 is a huge overkill for what I (and many?) do.
F4 is kind of the top of the hill for me. Next comes an RPi or some such Linux thing. Or an Android OS thing.

For me, connectivity seems to becoming paramount, either Bluetooth Low Energy or Wifi.

I guess this is why the ESP8266 is so popular, and why there is a load of interest in the ESP32 as its both WiFi and BLE.

Nordic have some nice BLE devices with more processor power than the old ATMega devices

As most people have a smartphone and always on Wifi connection, I generally don’t have a need for a huge around of processing power in the MCU.

A decent amount of code space and RAM , are important, as comms to other devices, can be memory hungry when having to transfer data via JSON and XML, but I don’t need super high clock speeds or loads of peripherals.

I wish I could say I was at a point to need these but I’m not. However where they will come in handy for me is in the Ham radio realm. When it gets to processing radio signals you end up with doing things like FFT and all sorts of digital signal processing. Some of my future projects will be mainly be processing received audio signals and filtering them and decoding different signal types. But again I’m a far cry from being to that point yet. But with the prices of this stuff getting cheaper all the time it sure brings it down to a point it’s gives me the option.

So a lot of my work will not be with wireless connectivity other than a few projects using ham radio bands which will give me a lot more power and distance. But like many the stuff I need wireless on like around the house the ESP8266 type systems will do the trick. They’re usually limited sensing, processing, and memory and more about communication locally.

However until I retire or win the Powerball my strides are extremely slow and frustrating.

Michael

There is another thread about running a RPi as a bare metal board, I suspect that would generally provide enough processing power for Ham stuff.

I think there are also ways to run the BeagleBone Black as bare metal.

But I guess it depends on whether either the RPi or BBB have enough of the right sort of peripheral interfaces

RogerClark wrote:There is another thread about running a RPi as a bare metal board, I suspect that would generally provide enough processing power for Ham stuff.

I think there are also ways to run the BeagleBone Black as bare metal.

But I guess it depends on whether either the RPi or BBB have enough of the right sort of peripheral interfaces

These MCU boards are getting so cheap, I’ve bought just about all the 32 bit small form factor boards to fiddle with- mostly about software and languages, not so much the hardware.
Like
Rpi zero (augmenting 2 older RPi)… With VNC and Samba. Cheap USB WiFi. At $5 these can’t be beat. Esp. running full python and libs. My Fav. Need more $5 boards for sale.
Huzzah good not great, 8266. Sans Lua.
China-crap 8266 boards. To the round file.
DigiStump Oak. Nice try with kickstarter but not viable (yet?)
Espruino Pico. Neat, but needs onboard WiFi or BLE. Noble effort with Javascript.
Particle.io Photon. My favorite if C it must be. ST MCU. Broadcom WiFi. Shames 8266.

mrburnette wrote:
… I was just curious… I hesitate buying hardware that I have no defined projects in queue because new hardware is evolving at a rapid pace.
Ray

stevech wrote:
Rpi zero (augmenting 2 older RPi)… With VNC and Samba. Cheap USB WiFi. At $5 these can’t be beat.

Ray

The SDR stuff uses the these RTL2832U dongles

Generally either this one

http://www.ebay.com/itm/RTL2832U-R820T- … Swu4BV5ZNR

or this one

http://www.ebay.com/itm/FM-HDTV-TV-Tune … SwJkJWjlpF

As these devices are not designed to receive signals below around 50Mhz people use an up converter

Something like this

http://www.ebay.com/itm/HF-Up-Converter … xy9eVRU0Ih

I have one of those dongles, and its very useful for looking at ISM band signals e.g. 433Mhz.
I don’t have an up converter, but I do have a down converter, so I can theoretically pick up Wifi and Bluetooth signals, by down converting them to around 400Mhz which the dongle will receive.
However in practice both Wifi and BLE are hard to receive as they frequency hop and you’d need to write some custom firmware to track the BLE packets as they jump from channel to channel.

martinayotte wrote:stevech wrote:
Rpi zero (augmenting 2 older RPi)… With VNC and Samba. Cheap USB WiFi. At $5 these can’t be beat.

Still very hard to get a RPi Zero for a reasonable price Down Under

None from my normal channels e.g. eBay or AliExpress

Cheapest I can see on AliExpress is $69 (AUD)

RogerClark wrote:Still very hard to get a RPi Zero for a reasonable price Down Under

None from my normal channels e.g. eBay or AliExpress

Cheapest I can see on AliExpress is $69 (AUD)

RogerClark wrote:Still very hard to get a RPi Zero for a reasonable price Down Under

None from my normal channels e.g. eBay or AliExpress

Cheapest I can see on AliExpress is $69 (AUD)