1Bitsy Kickstarter Small F4 Board

This Kickstarter showed up on Hackaday today
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/es … g-arm-prog

It’s an open source F4-based board that will ship in February for $20.

Interesting but quite expensive.

And.. Did you see the price of the BMP.. $50 !!!!

Hey everyone. Thanks for posting our Kickstarter here.

Roger, I am very surprised that you are so shocked by the price. I would assume that you would understand how much work and effort it is to create something. If you compare this price to any other commercial JTAG debugger it compares quite favorably. Even though the firmware is open source it does not mean we didn’t spend time or money creating it. Or maybe you assume that a black box closed source product should be more valuable than an open source one just because you can’t look inside? I personally think that the fact that it is open source makes it more valuable, not less. You should also understand that part of the revenue of the Kickstarter will be going back into the project. This means we will be able to spend more time on improving the firmware and associated software (like the atom-gdb-debugger that we have developed), new versions of the hardware and so on. If we just sell it at hardware cost we will fulfill the Kickstarter and go back to our day jobs, doing something else. I am not sure this is something you would want to buy.

I have seen several people react this way by now. I am very surprised by this attitude. Maybe it is because the market is flooded with cheap clone hardware, that was created by taking other peoples effort and creativity and cashing in on it, or maybe because the people who have those opinions have never created anything?

See it this way, by buying a Black Magic Probe you are donating to an open source project and you are also getting something in return. I think that is a great deal!

I hope this makes it a little bit clearer…

Cheers,
Piotr

RogerClark wrote:Interesting but quite expensive.

And.. Did you see the price of the BMP.. $50 !!!!

Hello

On the kickstarter you write “… we are planning to work on the following: … STM32Duino (aka. Arduino) platform support and verification” Have you tried to run the stm32duino F405 code to blink led? That is the closes to the STM32F415RGT6 and might work.

@ChuckM

I’m not sure if you are aware that the BMP has been discussed extensively on this forum http://www.stm32duino.com/viewtopic.php?t=122 (and in many other threads)

I also posted an article on my blog over a year ago on how to use the BMP firmware with a Maple mini and other boards

http://www.rogerclark.net/arduino-on-th … ontroller/

You may or may not be aware, that this is my forum, I pay the bills. I also maintain and develop the Arduino for STM32 core code (legacy inherited from Leaflabs abandonware)

I also develop and maintain the official STM32 core for Arduino.

I do all of this free of charge.

I wonder what value you would place on what I do totally FOC.

Even cheap ST-Link can be converted into BMP :

http://embdev.net/articles/STM_Discover … eap_Clones

Hope it is ok for the snippet quote …

RogerClark wrote:@ChuckM

… BMP has been discussed extensively on this forum …
… article on my blog over a year ago on how to use the BMP firmware with a Maple mini and other boards …
… my [Roger] forum …
… I [Roger] also maintain and develop the Arduino for STM32 core code (legacy inherited from Leaflabs abandonware) …
… I also develop and maintain the official STM32 core for Arduino. …
… I do all of this free of charge.

And then

I wonder what value you would place on what I do totally FOC.

martinayotte wrote:Even cheap ST-Link can be converted into BMP :

http://embdev.net/articles/STM_Discover … eap_Clones

I think supporting open source hardware and software leads to a greater personal understanding of how things work. One of the first projects I did with my Blue Pill board was to port the black magic software to it. I wanted to show that you can roll your own professional level tools using low cost hardware and software knowledge shared generously by others in their open source software.

Early today I had a chat conversation with esden about the Black Magic Probe software and asked if there was some way to support the Black Magic Probe project without purchasing the hardware. He talked with Gareth and they added a paypal donation button to the readme file. If you want to support their project and the spirit of open source but don’t want to buy the hardware you can go there to contribute. I urge all of you who want to encourage/thank the BMP team to click on paypal donation button and give a little back. It will make you feel better I promise ; ) Without projects like blackmagic probe we are doomed to be locked into vendor solutions that are often closed sourced and lack any soul.

Go to the readme file in the source, look for the new paypal button and make a contribution:

https://github.com/blacksphere/blackmag … /README.md

[edit] $15 NZD == a little more than $10 USD .. in case you were wondering
Pizza at Sal’s Pizza in Auckland is about $30 NZD .. in case you were wondering
[/edit] [edit 2] Paypal Exchange Rate today: 1 U.S. Dollar = 1.36363 New Zealand Dollars
[/edit]

-rick

Paypal button doesnt work

I’ve raised an issue

RogerClark wrote:Paypal button doesnt work

Tried it from W7 in Firefox and got the error

Paypal seemed to suggest it was an invalid or malformed link

Bit if a cross post…

But I was intending to publish my code for the BMP to run on the Baite STLink ( as that device uses a F103C8)

But if I did that, there is a strong possibility that Baite will just download my binary and start selling the same hardware as STLinks, at the same price ( around $3)
which would undercut the kickstarter BMP price.

Edit.

various news stories about similar things

https://www.google.com.au/search?q=chin … ent=safari

Can somebody talk about the 1Bitsy??????

FYI: I’m a backer, for an early bird BMP and 1Bitsy. I’m curious to see how the 1Bitsy compares against the Teensy 3.2. Also have the Teensy 3.6, STM32F407 Discovery and STM32F469 Discovery and a Netduino 2 Plus. As you can see, I’m getting away from Microchp PIC and AVR, but still have a soft spot for ESP8266 and hopefully will be getting an ESP32 soon.

The 1Bitsy appears to be in the $25 price range, close to the Teensy 3.2 at $19 and the Maple Remix from Olimex at around $20.

RogerClark wrote:Bit if a cross post…

But I was intending to publish my code for the BMP to run on the Baite STLink ( as that device uses a F103C8)

But if I did that, there is a strong possibility that Baite will just download my binary and start selling the same hardware as STLinks, at the same price ( around $3)
which would undercut the kickstarter BMP price.

Edit.

various news stories about similar things

https://www.google.com.au/search?q=chin … ent=safari

blackt1ger wrote:Can somebody talk about the 1Bitsy??????

FYI: I’m a backer, for an early bird BMP and 1Bitsy. I’m curious to see how the 1Bitsy compares against the Teensy 3.2. Also have the Teensy 3.6, STM32F407 Discovery and STM32F469 Discovery and a Netduino 2 Plus. As you can see, I’m getting away from Microchp PIC and AVR, but still have a soft spot for ESP8266 and hopefully will be getting an ESP32 soon.

The 1Bitsy appears to be in the $25 price range, close to the Teensy 3.2 at $19 and the Maple Remix from Olimex at around $20.