Making contributions to Leaf Labs

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Making contributions to Leaf Labs

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Started 3 years ago by Rod
Latest reply from gbulmer

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gbulmer
Moderator

(Sorry, I realised I should reduce my posting on the 'other thread' so I am posting a second time here ... )

I dropped a PDF of an STM32F103 board I did last year, called piXe-2, into my github gbulmer/openstm32hw repo. We have made double sided DIY PCB's, but I am reworking for F4. It uses quite a lot of strategies and techniques we learned for DIY boards, including a new footprint for the LQFP64 to get cleaner etching.

It shows the difference between Eagles' autorouter and hand routing. The autorouted MM4 has about 150 vias (a guess), the hand routed piXe-2 has 28 (I think); a lot less drilling when making a DIY board :-)

(Edit: if responses to my original post are copied to here, I'll delete my first post so it is less repetitive)

Posted 3 years ago #
gbulmer
Moderator

siy - in an attempt to reduce my posts on "the other thread" (http://forums.leaflabs.com/topic.php?id=1303&page=7#post-8119) I will respond here ...

gbulmer, F4 Discovery started appearing in local stores for more or less reasonable price (about $30 retail).

Here they are 9.96 GBP, or about $16, + 20% tax
http://uk.farnell.com/stmicroelectronics/stm32f4discovery/board-eval-stm32f4-discovery/dp/2009276?Ntt=STM32F4-discovery
http://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/products/7458434/?searchTerm=745-8434

I live close enough to an RS trade desk, that I can order on-line & pick one up an hour later.

Not as cheap as in on-line stores, but this is still very attractive price (closest alternative - OLIMEXINO-STM32 - is about $45!). Last time I've visited one of the stores peoples were asking for F4 Discovery 3 or 4 times during 10 minutes while I was in store. I had good chance to see how big interest to this board is.

Agree, it is much more attractive than an Olimexino-STM32.
When I show people, explain what is on it, and say "under £12", they are amazed.
I am going to do a workshop to show people how to use it next week.

As a consequence I got the conclusion that support for this board in libmaple and IDE is extremely important.

I want a simple to use IDE, like Maple IDE or Wiring IDE.
As an alternative, NetBeans might be adequate, and I have read that GDB talking to the STM32F4-DISCOVERY ST-LINK/V2 works in NetBeans.
So that is what I am doing at the moment. I might divert temporarily (in order to make progress) and use Eclipse (which IMHO is "crazy complicated" for a beginner).

Posted 3 years ago #
bubulindo
Member

Whereabouts is that workshop? Anywhere near London? I'd be more than pleased to be there. :)

By the way, to order from Farnell, you need to make an order of 20£. I bought two boards and a 555 (to make a optic fiber tester). :)

Posted 3 years ago #
siy
Member

Well, Eclipse looks complicated only because there is no appropriate plugin and at present everyone who uses Eclipse for ARM development just uses bare CDT which looks complicated only because it is virtually universal in regard to toolchain and target. For AVR MCUs there is a dedicated plugin built on top of CDT which makes development for these MCUs much more convenient because it knows much more details about target. Dedicated Maple plugin (note - not ARM in general and even not STM32 in general, but Maple or even limbaple) might be as easy to use as existing IDE while retaining incredible power of Eclipse. Perhaps, some ideas might be also borrowed from CooCox IDE, which, by the way, is also Eclipse based.

Some time ago I wrote a post in another thread about adding into Maple IDE ability to export sketches as Eclipse projects. Even this simple addition might be extremely helpful, because it will allow one to start in Maple IDE and then move into Eclipse once project exceeds Maple IDE capabilities. It also allow peoples minimize plain Eclipse configuration step (because most required changes are done at project level).

Posted 3 years ago #
gbulmer
Moderator

siy - IMHO, this is a 'religious war', with personal preferences dominating over logic.

IMHO Eclipse is complicated, i.e. it is more complex than necessary.

I have not used Eclipse for a few years. When it came out, I was grateful for a 'proper' IDE that wasn't tied to Windows, and supported Java well.

Since then, I have grown to dislike the way the Eclipse "User Interface" behaves like a 1995 Windows application single window with a bunch of documents inside. I thought we'd moved on past that more than 15 years ago.

Eclipse restricted the amount of stuff I can have easy and direct access to to fit within a single window with a few tabs. How dumb was that? When I developed C/C++ on Sun workstations in the 90's, using many editor and terminal windows, using makefiles, I could organise windows the way I liked. We were writing X-Windows applications, and the workflow was okay.

IMHO Eclipse UI compared to XCode 3.x UI is a retrograde step.

But this is not a rational topic, so I am going to stop :-)

Posted 3 years ago #
siy
Member

One clarification: Eclipse is not limited to one window. In fact each "view" (in eclipse terminology) can be placed as separate window, views can be grouped inside window and so on and so forth. My working configuration consists of one, two or three windows (each contains a number of views) depending on the current activity.

In fact among IDE's which I've used during recent years (Netbeans, Eclipse, IDEA) Eclipse UI is the most flexible in regard to organizing working space according to my needs and preferences. I like to have as much information available directly as possible, so I'm using two-display configuration of my working PC's at work and at home. Eclipse allows use this large amounts of desktop space effectively (in fact this is one of the main reasons why I didn't switched to IDEA despite its better support of many things which I'm using to do my job). In other words, I did choose Eclipse for completely rational reasons, there is nothing religious. Perhaps I'm too old to retain hate-love relationships with tools :)

Posted 3 years ago #
gbulmer
Moderator

siy - I downloaded it, and yes, it can have multiple windows. I couldn't find example images on the web, which seems funny.

So it is better than I remember, and I will try to find time to give it a go.

It still seems to be a 'pixel glutton', wasting space on stuff which has little use to me, so I'm unlikely to like it.
I haven't been able to get rid of the editor tab bar, which is pointless when I only want a single file in the editor (and lots of separate editor windows).
Similarly, I don't need the build and debug stuff on every editor window.
I don't need all the little tool-group-icons for windows I want to have separate, and they further cause borders to be bigger than needed.
I don't think I need the text 'Smart Insert' or 'Writable' either.
Oh, and I clicked on the "minimise" button in the editor tab bar, and Eclipse blew up.
Not inspiring, and somewhat infuriating.

Explicitly more complex than NetBeans, and IMHO not as approachable as NetBeans.
I could imagine it could be trimmed down though.

If I hadn't grown up on simple, infinitely flexible systems, or grown to like XCode, or minimalist tools like TextMate, I'd probably be okay with it.

Given the enormous choice in tools, I don't see any reason to put up with something that gets in my way, when there are tools which support the way I like to work.

Posted 3 years ago #
bubulindo
Member

@gbulmer

Did you see my question? Any chance that the workshop is close to where I am?

Posted 3 years ago #
siy
Member

Click RMB on toolbar and try playing with "Customize perspective..." dialog. Also, in Window->Preferences->General->Editors you may find "Show multiple editor tabs" check box which is checked by default. Beside numerous pre-packaged configuration options you may try to check Help->Eclipse Marketplace for UI styling/configuration plugins/themes.

In fact, current versions of Eclipse are just a containers for a number of plugins and eclipse binary is just a launcher for the container. So, complexity and other issues are properties of particular configuration and/or particular plugins, they are not inherent properties of Eclipse as a whole. I'm completely agree with you that default Eclipse packages definitely not the most simple and intuitive tools around, but I also keep in mind that Eclipse has its own (rather long) history and (rather big) user base with already established habits and expectations in regard to look and feel. No matter how good or bad these habits and expectations are, they worth to be taken into account. Otherwise with every new version of Eclipse existing users would need to study interface again like every windows version :)

And yes, Eclipse definitely can be trimmed down/customized and to any reasonable size/look. So, making something simple, like Maple IDE, is definitely possible. With comparable functionality it would not be significantly different in startup time and package size. But that would enable unlimited growth of functionality as user requirements grow without need to change IDE and study new interface.

Posted 3 years ago #
gbulmer
Moderator

siy - I used Eclipse when it came out, and often since, so I am aware of its architecture and history. My company was a Sun and IBM partner, and we used Eclipse and the forerunner of NetBeans on client projects. I have run development groups since who have used those tools. My commercial view is time spent on making tools work the way we need is time that can't be spent making money, solving the clients problems.

For my day-to-day development, I really like XCode. If I did a lot of Ruby, I'd use TextMate. In reality I can use Eclipse, and have used it in the last 10 years, but on a Mac, I prefer not to. If I were to change, I'd use NetBeans first because it has DTrace support. Anyway ...

It makes huge amounts of sense (to me) to use an existing IDE which is portable across Windows, Mac and Linux (but not in that order :-)

I think professional developers are very well served with the range of IDEs, and can cope with using a variety of IDEs. They are not the people I am focusing on.

I think beginners are not well supported by IDEs.

IMHO when one starts programming it is hard "to see the wood for the trees". An IDE with huge amounts of flexibility typically has lots of UI to configure that flexibility. This is 'cognitive baggage', it adds things to understand, but very little value.

My experience is beginners are able to use the Wiring/Processing/Arduino IDE in a few minutes, and very little distracts them. I am certain Eclipse could be configured, and plugins built, to provide an easy to use IDE, but I haven't seen it, so I assume it is a lot of work. Wiring/Processing already exists.

Posted 3 years ago #
gbulmer
Moderator

bubulindo - I apologise, for the slow response.

The workshop is in London at DEV8D: http://dev8d.org/
Registration is closed, but you might try to contact the organisers. Maybe you'd like to help me run the workshop?-)

Posted 3 years ago #
bubulindo
Member

That would be interesting. I'll be in London on those dates so I'd be willing to give you a hand if you need some help.

I'm not an expert on the discovery board and I've only started with the Maple, but if you give me some more info about what the workshop will cover, I can get up to date pretty fast. My mail is bubulindo@gmail.com so we can communicate outside of this thread.

Posted 3 years ago #
siy
Member

Well, I suspect that reasons for not using Eclipse as a base for the Wiring/Processing IDE have no relation to Eclipse itself.

Hope I'll have time to dig into this deeper. Building Maple IDE on top of Eclipse would enable access to many extremely useful things, from syntax highlighting and source code navigation to built-in debugging support. And this is a good chance to make it look... hmm... well, not so ugly :)

P.S. Sometimes I'm dreaming about forty-eight hours instead of twenty-four...

Posted 3 years ago #
gbulmer
Moderator

bubulindo - okay, will do.

Edit: Have done :-)

Posted 3 years ago #

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