Good god. I literally just uninstalled MPLAB IDE for a project that we cancelled. It freed up something like 30Gb on my system. I built the existing project once!

I also really like ST. At a previous job our go-to processors were Nordic for wearables or anything that needed BLE, and STM32 for pretty much everything else. Wasn't unusual to have an STM32 for all the peripheral I/O and an nRF52 hanging off an I2C port just to talk to an app.

Nordic is OK. Starting up a new project is nowhere near as easy as STMCubeMX and they do tend to update their SDKs frequently which can be annoying if you have to support legacy projects, but we used them for years with no problems.

I was on the Microchip bandwagon until the PIC32. Little MIPS MCUs with onboard RAM and graphics, awesome! ...except they came with an errata that listed huge problems with every interesting peripheral, and it didn't improve for ages. They may still suck, I don't know.

A while back I tried out Espressif's esp32 and I was impressed by what they were offering. Their devices seem to be well documented and the esp-idf framework is really pleasant to use. It's much easier to work with than STM32Cube and ST's sprawling documentation.

> The only vendor I actually enjoy working with to any degree is ST, and only design boards using their uC's for that reason.

ST has good documentation most of the time, but for a while some of their higher end MCUs had a lot of weird bugs and errata that were simply not documented. I haven’t used any of their modern parts recently but I’ve heard the situation has started improving. I have some friends who were ready to abandon ST altogether after losing so much time on a design to undocumented bugs and parts not behaving as documented.

True, and Microchip is still good when compared to the likes of Broadcom and Qualcomm.

I'm not really an embedded engineer, just getting my degree in EE and doing hobby projects with embedded. For one particular project I've been using a number for different BLE microcontrollers to see what works best. Started out with the ESP32 where I got everything running pretty quickly but the current consumption was about 10x as high as I wanted it to be. Then made a design with an STM32 and at first I liked the IDE and the documentation, but I sort of ran a ground and also disliked how incredibly expensive this particular microcontroller was. Now on my desk I have one which I think is the cheapest BLE microcontrollers from Silicon labs. EFR22BG22CC something. Neat little thing in a QFN-32 package, a simple hardware design and a lot cheaper than the STM32. The IDE seems pretty simple and I think that most of their tooling is open source since there is also an implementation for it in visual studio code. Documentation isn't as great, but I can get by. And also, despite the wide range of microcontrollers they offer, they do seem to be available in large quantities. The one I used mouser had like 350k of and more on the way.

I've yet to see anyone here talk about silicon labs microcontrollers. Why's that?

Which NXP tooling did you have trouble with? I’ve downloaded MCUXpresso earlier this week, no NDA or anything (yes you do need an account), it’s never been hard to get…

Nordics are good with documentation and devex indeed. Zephyr is still a bloated and somewhat buggy disaster for this scale of MCUs. Doesn't really beats ST unless you are power-constrained and need wireless connectivity - the hardware is a bit too quirky.

Perhaps they think that by forcing everyone to go through the sales dept just to get the basic docs, they'll get better sales opportunities.

How do you upsell a hardware engineer who just wants to buy a specific chip, and already has everything to evaluate and use it? You don't. So you force everyone to go through sales, and then sales wants to talk to non-engineering higher-ups, and then the upsell happens - while the people who actually knew what they wanted remain as far away as possible.

And if you don't have the pockets deep enough for the sales dept to acknowledge your existence, then you might as well not exist.

When you get into high volume production, the vendors have their own engineers who will work with you directly. Depending on the arrangement and your volume they might bill you for the time, require you to buy blocks of support hours, or they might bend over backward to help you out in any way possible if you’re buying enough parts from them.

Dealing with small clients is not a priority for most part vendors. Many of them won’t even sell you chips at all until you can qualify yourself as a big customer or, in some cases, buy a license to start designing with their parts for six figures or more.

Unfortunately for the small players, it’s not a priority for most companies to support small customers who might only buy a couple thousand parts or less.

Because creating good documentation suitable for external consumers costs money, and even if you have decent documentation, people buying small quantities of parts can end up costing companies money just to interact with one of their application engineers. If you're not set up for it (very few companies are), it literally is negative value to answer support questions for small time customers.

Because the margin per chip is low and supporting more customers cost more. They sell these parts for couple of bucks/part at volume, although it costs 20-30 million NRE. With the fixed production costs added, they have tens of cents per part margin. At that point less than 1M part customer becomes irrelevant.

Guessing: if you publish too much about your design, competitors can use it against you during sales negotiations. "Don't buy theirs, ours has better pin placement, better IF, better thermals, etc"

I think the short answer is because manufacturers don’t care.

There's certainly cases where the documentation basically doesn't exist, or it's essentially the same as the design documentation, and the strategy is basically that if you're a big enough customer then you'll be getting some engineer time to make things work, and if you're a smaller customer you'll be told to pound sand anyway, it's not worth them fixing up their documentation to get your business. Generally the more complex and specialised the hardware the more it'll look like this, and it basically saves them on R&D because they have only a few applications to actually focus on.

Atmel hasn't existed for almost 10 years (Microchip bought them in 2016). The situation has not improved in the intervening time.

Of course that depends if the optimization was compiled into the version they have. One can imagine two binaries with the optimizations just missing from the free one.

In some jurisdictions you may even be able to sue them for the source code without bothering GNU.

I have heard that this is how it is done before. I wonder how that works with a third party? If they happened to come across the binaries some how they could demand the source. I also wonder if that clause is enforceable.

I think that the issue here is the following:

    - you can charge money for things
    - anything that's not built with the "official compiler" is not "supported"

They used ARM chips, so not even anything strange...

The real issue would come if they did not provide the source code for the gcc build they sell you, though.

Personally I hated the NXP's docs for the ARM M4 core. Bunch of dry tables listing each register in details, lacking the juicy diagrams and descriptions on how the bits integrate to work as a subsystem. I constantly needed to cross-reference 3+ documents (most of which describe the whole family and not the specific IC). Their HALs and code samples were obviously written by students/interns.

I liked working with Microchip uC, but this was back when the whole IC (PIC24) was described in a single ~1000 page document. I found it very readable and instructive in general.

If I had to pick something today it would be with RP2040/2350. The docs look awesome and there's a huge community that is not locked down in some corporate moderated forum but spread organically, with actually useful GitHub projects. It is the only embedded product where it felt like the open source community is along for the ride and not just picking up the scraps. I hope they continue this line of products.

> The ideas behind token ring underlies DOCIS.

> While not technically TR, it does use a token that moves from device to device.

I assume you typo'd DOCSIS there, but no, DOCSIS does not use a token; it uses separate channels for down- & uplink, and the uplink channels are TDMA and/or CDMA depending on DOCSIS version.

AFAIK Ethernet is used for realtime audio distribution, so that can't be completely correct.

of course eventually everything becomes a Broadcom chip ....