No. 13, March/April 2011

Embedded World 2011

Event Wrap up

More than 19000 visitors and 800 exhibitors, Embedded World remains our "can't miss" European event for embedded technologies and components. For 2011, it proved, again, to be an excellent opportunity to meet industry partners and customers and to get your input on needs and trends. Particularly well received were Raisonance demonstrations of the development and evaluation features of our Open4 platform, evolutions in our software tool set notably for ARM Cortex, and the STM8L presentations by our in house training and compiler guru, Bruno Richard.

ARM Cortex-M3 tool demonstrations drew the most visitors, notably for the STM32, LPC17xx and Stellaris families (available in the next public release of RKit-ARM). There were hints of the new application design contest on the STM32 EvoPrimer at www.stm32circle.com which was announced in the following weeks.

Many visitors were also particularly attracted to the Open4 development platform, which goes beyond being a "good-looking," feature-loaded starter kit, to providing a complete development solution for debugging/programming of external application boards.

STM8L training sessions featuring EvoPrimer for STM8L drew over 120 participants interested in the recent "EnergyLite" lines from STMicroelectronics. In the 15-minute presentations followed by question & answer with Bruno Richard, engineers got an overview of STM8L in a battery powered application, plus a rapid look at its power management features. The presentation illustrated how low-power application development is more than just choosing a "low-power" component. It is about implementing hardware and software with an eye on application-wide consumption, power loss and a strategy for compensating these.

Visitors also saw demonstration of REHMI, a colorful and interactive GUI on EvoPrimer with touchscreen. The REHMI graphical interface library provided a clean, eye-catching example of a GUI users could implement on a mid-range 32-bit MCU. You can take a look at the survey results from the REHMI interface.

It was a pleasure to see everyone at Embedded World and we appreciate all of the comments and suggestions. Based on your input, you'll see evolutions in the Raisonance software tools with additional productivity features in a new "Enterprise" software line. For more information refer to the online brochures in the support section of www.mcu-raisonance.com.

OpenWorld Contest at www.stm32circle.com

Register Today - Tools and $20000 in Cash Prizes

Registration is open for the OpenWorld application design contest promoting development of technologies for human assistance applications on the STM32 and EvoPrimer. This years' contest is theme-based. The theme promotes Human Assistance Applications that facilitate daily life for people with handicaps or limiting medical conditions.

The contest is organized in 2 phases:

• Concept Phase to 15 May 2011
  • Register, submit a brief description of your idea and win an EvoPrimer to support your application development
• Development Phase to 14 December 2011
  • Create you application and submit it at www.stm32circle.com

Many resources are available to you, including:

• EvoPrimer development platforms
• Complete software toolset (GCC C compiler and IDE)
• CircleOS with API to facilitate application coding
• Forums with discussion on a wide range of STm32 peripherals and their implementation
• +100 sample projects implementing a variety of peripherals on STM32 primers
• Links and articles about human assistance applications
• Complete rules

Register now and win at www.stm32circle.com

"Autonomie" and the OpenWorld Design Contest for STM32

Human Assistance Technologies

Those who know past STM32 applications design contests (for STM32 Primer1, for Primer2), probably remarked that this is the first time the community is promoting a contest with a theme. This bears the explanation, what is Human Assistance and how has it become associated with the contest.

The contest theme is inspired by a project called "Autonomie" and an engineer who, himself, experienced loss of eyesight. The theme is based on a recognition that technology while rapidly advancing, often lags in addressing those who may benefit from it the most. A contest is a perfect vector to stimulate ideas and create or at least demonstrate possible applications that may be the "human assistance solutions" of the future.

The experience of our "engineer" resulted in "Autonomie" - a project and technology consortium that brings together research and industry to study, propose and promote technologies that facilitate the lives of people with sight impairments. The project itself is advancing navigation and other technologies that should facilitate access to transportation, information and public services by the sight impaired.

But this is just one population that could benefit from increasing powerful, affordable and mobile technologies. People suffering any kind of mobility impairment, sensory loss or limiting medical condition might eventually benefit not just from high tech components and platforms, but also from the skills, experience and creativity of our worldwide community of engineers and technology hobbyists at stm32circle.

More information, a dedicated forum and a contest registration area are provided on the contest site - www.stm32circle.com . More articles to provide ideas and advice will be coming to the site, too.

You can also learn more about relevant technologies and research on the Autonomie, project site - http://autonomie.minalogic.net/index.en.html .

So... take a look, share your ideas, and join www.stm32circle.com in building an OpenWorld for all.

Open4 - All the Tool that You'll Ever Need

Evaluate, Demo, Debug and More...

That's the thought that many Embedded World visitors had after viewing our Open4 demonstrations for developing on ARM Cortex-M3.

Raisonance's Primers always challenged common perceptions of "starter kits" or "evaluation boards with contemporary designs, inspiring features (accelerometer, audio, touchscreen, ...), portability, software development facilitators (CircleOS) and a dedicated community.

EvoPrimer (ST's Open4-based primer) takes the challenge two steps further with its modular design. This makes the platform reusable when working with different MCUs, but also extends tool functionality to programming and debugging of external hardware. With the addition of minor connecting hardware, it connects to a microncotroller on your own application hardware to program that device and debug your code.

In addition to this flexibility, Open4 and EvoPrimer users on Cortex-M3 MCUs benefit from SWV trace capability in the next public release of the Raisonance software tool set (Ride7, RKit-ARM). With the SWV and Ride7, users have access to real time trace of code execution, variable monitoring, PC sampling and visibility of the CPU's internal counters, data read/write, variables, peripherals, events and more.

With this added flexibility, Open4 is the tool for your complete development cycle - from learning, evaluation and demonstration, to developing and fine tuning your application on your own hardware design.

More information is provided in our Getting Started document "Raisonance Tools for ARM Families."

Raisonance Embedded Human Machine Interface

Exploring GUI for Deeply Embedded Applications

REHMI, a library based on an on-going Raisonance design project, drew the attention of many visitors at Embedded World with a clean, no-frills GUI implementation on an EvoPrimer with STM32F103VE microcontroller.

And, as promised, here are those survey results from those who took the time to complete the exercise. Please note, these results were not obtained by a specific or rigorous sampling method... this was just for fun  ;-)

The large portion of respondents had never used or implemented an RTOS (54%) or GUI (47%). Among the RTOS that respondents cited having used or experimented with, FreeRTOS topped the ranking at 17% followed by uC/OSII at 8%. For GUI libraries, the most used was uC/GUI (13%) followed by EmWin (8%).

The interface visual and performance ratings were good overall, with the performance rating (3.3) slightly lower than the visual appearance (3.7). Performance and visual ratings were judged on a scale of 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent).

For respondents to took the time to work on the survey, thanks again for you input.

MCU Training

New MCU Training Events

Just getting started developing applications for STM32 or STM8 devices? Raisonance offers training courses based on certified STMicroelectronics' content to help you get a head start on your application development.

Raisonance microcontroller trainings provide insights and hands-on experience with configuring device peripherals and features, coding, compiling and debugging applications.

A complete calendar of training courses and descriptions are provided on our training pages. The next sessions:

• STM8S
  May 4-6, 2011 (3 days)
  This beginner-level course will introduce you to the STM8Sxx 8-bit devices from STMicroelectronics.

• STM32F1xx Connectivity Line
  May 25-27, 2011 (3 days)
  This advanced-level course will help you take advantage of the Ethernet and USB OTG host features of the STM32 Connectivity line of devices.

More info...