Actually 2018 has been here in Melbourne for 9 hours already, but I know its still to arrive for a lot of you 
Its been an interesting 2017. I underestimated the popularity of the LibMaple based core. I presumed that there would be more migration to the STM HAL based cores, either STM’s official core or Daniel’s STM32 Generic
I know there are a stack of PRs that I have to process, but I’ve had a very busy end to 2017 with both work and home life which have to take priority.
Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the code or provided their words of wisdom on the forum
And I wish you all a healthy and prosperous 2017.
My best wishes to all members and their families.
Ray
[Rick Kimball – Mon Jan 01, 2018 10:47 pm] –
Cheers to another year of trying to get this stuff right!
I believe this is 2018 first funny post 
Yea, let’s make libmaple code strong
And don’t desperate, this will be just “another” year, not better or worse than the previous one, just different…
[stevestrong – Tue Jan 02, 2018 3:29 pm] –
And don’t desperate, this will be just “another” year, not better or worse than the previous one, just different…
Just 2017++
In 2017, the best thing is the concrete progress in 4xx pill development. Small surprises for me in 2017 were:
– CubeMx HAL and LL are not gaining popularity in this forum
– ESP32 board prices have come down, but not eroding interest in F103/F407
Cheers, Ollie
[Ollie – Wed Jan 03, 2018 4:01 pm] –
– ESP32 board prices have come down, but not eroding interest in F103/F407
Actually, in my mind and workshop, they are. Between the ESP32 at under $8 from AliExpress and the often available rPi_Zero_W for $5 from Microcenter here in Atlanta, the 20K SRAM in the STM32F1xx is surprisingly meager. I’m viewing the Maple Mini like I used to view the Arduino mini or micro… that is, a cheap utility board that just happens to be programmable.
The great thing about the ESP32 (and ESP8266) is that one can use SPIFFS to gain some serious table capability. Now I used to think of all that dead flash as just a wasted resource to be used in the n+1 program revision, but with a little creative thinking, the uC can be a real powerhouse for table-based calculations, etc.
I have an example here: https://www.hackster.io/rayburne/oui-ou … 266-323ae4
In this prototype, I have included the ability to store the entire Organizationally Unique Identifier database in SPIFFS … about 800K
I’ m old and in college calculators were just beginning to be allowed. Most engineering was still slide-rule and look up tables. One can do a lots with a table. 
At 80MHz, the ESP8266 requires 43 seconds worst-case to read the OUI data in flash and parse through the dataset looking for a specific OUI. The goal of this project is to reduce accessing any single OUI to less than 1 second. In many cases, the results appear almost instantly after you press the Enter Key.
Ray
CS Nol
