$10 STM32 kit

ST is jumping on the bandwagon with a $10 kit for the STM32:

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They've ensured that everyone has plenty of stock, unlike TI with their $4.30 MSP430 board. I've only just received the latter, despite ordering them ages ago.

Reply to
Leon
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ST is jumping on the bandwagon with a $10 kit for the STM32:

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They've ensured that everyone has plenty of stock, unlike TI with their $4.30 MSP430 board. I've only just received the latter, despite ordering them ages ago.

Leon

Reply to
Leon

VERY COOL! Thanks for that link.

Reply to
larwe

I think licensing has gotten out of control. I am a member of IEEE and chair of a local group. We were being moved to a new web site host platform and I had to accept the user agreement. When I got to the indemnification clause, I hit the brakes realizing that although the likelihood of it ever being enforced was remote, my potential liability was unlimited and uncontrolled. So I declined, others have declined and we now are looking for a preferable web presence.

The license ST is asking you to accept says you don't own the eval board! I've never seen that on hardware before. What is the point of "licensing" the hardware to engineers to evaluate the product. What the devil are they afraid of???

Rick

Reply to
rickman

f

Using it in a real product? They want you to buy the chip, not the board in volume. They must be taking heavy losses on the board.

Reply to
linnix

Thanks, Leon. The "STM32VLDISCOVERY (the solution costs less than $10)" doesn't seem correct, though. I tried each of the listed disty types and they all want about $11.85 (sans shipping or order limit issues.) That's almost %20 more. One of the links doesn't even show up a valid page (Avnet's.)

Jon

Reply to
Jon Kirwan

Basically everybody wants to move to the latest fad 'cloud' everything in other words you never own anything, have no assetts and pay anuual or monthly subscriptions for everything to milk more money out of people using the financial industry model for insurance etc.

Recently had an invite to use a mbed cloud compiler for evaluation. No thanks as no doubt the licensing, and SLA for availability of my files will be whenever we can. If my systems fail I can work around it. If I need a specific version I can sort it. Cloud everything means all control, even data security goes out the window.

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Reply to
Paul

I just read the license. It's not quite as annoying as I first figured upon reading rickman's comment about it (separately, his comment about the new web site platform is intriguing, also.) I gather they don't want their boards which were made for demo purposes and not vetted out for anything else winding up in someone's product and therefore, come hell or high water, open for possible litigation that might reach back to some deep pocket (namely, theirs.)

Writing it up this way probably provides the maximum possible protection from anyone reaching back to them.

Might become a template other companies may use?

Jon

Reply to
Jon Kirwan

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t of

If anythng goes wrong, the micro would be the first to blame. Are they going to loan out all their micros? What if they demand their micros back from all my customers? I would rather buy NXP in that case.

Reply to
linnix

Well, I took this to be just about the demo board as a whole unit... not about the cpu. Did you read it differently?

Jon

Reply to
Jon Kirwan

It sounds like your inner crotchety old man is showing through :)

I empathize with you. Today's implementation of "cloud" stuff is risky and not for everybody. But I think it's the evolution of the networked world, for all that anyone can dream up right now.

We can fight it and live our lives on our front stoop retired or we can embrace it with a healthy dose of your skepticism.

JJS

Reply to
John Speth

I see Arrow has them for slightly over $10:

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Jon

Reply to
Jon Kirwan

What I've always wondered about these ultra-cheap dev kits is What motivates the vendor to price them so low?

If you're a pro, it really doesn't matter if it's $10 or $50. You'll pay more because you might have hugely larger more money to reap if you use the chip in your next design. That expense is insignificant. So maybe it's priced so low that anyone who's curous will find it so low they'll just pay out of pocket. The vendor will get more hands-on introductions that way but it brings into the group of purchasers those who are only casually interested and not just the ones who are seriously considering to use the chip. Does the vendor think the casual ones will someday become serious in large enough numbers?

Then there's the hobbyists and tinkerers. Are those groups the vendor's targets too?

I know from my own experience that when I get a cheap dev kit, the joyful and productive toying phase of using it is often short and then I end it with little learned except how to blink an LED. The more expensive ones that are loaded up with I/O ports are much more fun and those are the ones I play with more and would likely use in the future.

JJS

Reply to
John Speth

f

Did you read the section below that, about WEEE?

MY guess is that this "you don't own it" language is there to avoid the payment of e-waste fees, which helps keep the cost down. So, blame Brussels as usual.

Reply to
larwe

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s I

For me, the most useful eval kit is the micro on a bare minimum size PCB with .100" header pin to every pin of the device. Perhaps if they also put a JTAG connector and space for a crystal on the board, that is ok. ANYTHING else on the eval board just annoys me as I try to connect the micro to whatever hardware I actually want to drive.

Reply to
larwe

Speaking from experience selling inexpensive controller boards for 15 year, I can say that for every dev kit that actually developed into a product, there's at least 5 more sitting on top of a file cabinet in the engineer's office.

My real appreciation of good salespeople is their ability to pick up the phone and get the engineer to take my dev kit off the filing cabinet and make a product out of it.

Reply to
Jim Stewart

Considering to have it work with everything you will have to rewite the laws of most countries of the world as financial, medical, personal and patentable records are just a small subset that businesses, agencies, governments and individuls cannot use it for. In some cases without breaking several existing laws.

Several licensing bodies in quite a few countries do not allow members to use offline backup systems as the suppliers cannot even guarantee which country the backup will be held in. Let alone SLA, indemnity insurance levels and other contactual things that could screw a business.

can

Most of it is hype and is only useful to individual who do not care if the only copy of their CV is lost due to poor SLA, or their records sold by corrupt employees.

This sort of thing has already happened with outsourcing in the last 5 years.

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Reply to
Paul

Maybe they hope some university will use them for courses and get introductions that way. Thus being so low priced, they can say it is priced low enough already to avoid educational discounting.

Likewise as long as it does not get too expensive.

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Reply to
Paul

Why not ? Targeting students might be a good bet. Once they're hired, they may use your product if they have hacked on it before.

Reply to
PFC

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And, if one of them at some time make/design new product/s, one might as well use that MCU. They give people an opportunity to get familiar with their products. It's like samples of hair shampoo, soap, or perfume. You might like it, you tested it for free. You buy it, and perhaps use it for =93many =93years at much higher price than free :D It seems to me that in the nature of people, is to be loyal...

I don't understand why one would say that for professionals it doesn't matter if price is 50$ or 10$? You get a chance to test all flavors of an ice cream for the price of one huge one taste ice cream ball.

Reply to
matejz.sb

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