I am considering using ST7 part with USB on-board. I have not used ST7 before, but have worked with PIC, AVR & MSP430.
It looks like Cosmic offers a 4K limited version of their C-compiler. Is the Cosmic compiler/IDE (IDEA) any good?
Any bizarre or strange problems?
Thanks you. HW.
I've used the Cosmic and Hiware (now Metrowerks) compilers and have been very pleased. I have several ST Emulators, all which were very low cost and are good enough. Not used any USB parts to report anything but have used a big range of parts from the Lite family (1K5) to ST7F521 (60K)
One word of warning - I would recommend only using production parts, rather than ones "just around the corner". Our company got bitten badly when believing that a device would be properly released when we needed volume silicon.
I have used many ST7 devices and generally very pleased. Good noise immunity, peripherals, flat memory. Not great for bit bashing compared to others but you can usually get round the problem with the good peripherals. I would recommend cosmic over metrowerks, better code density software./hardware stacks. Do not bother with cosmic debugger idea/zap - use ST's Visual Debug instead.
The softec indart is a great little tool for the XFlash parts FLITE/26x etc but is a real pain with HDFlash parts - 321/521 etc. This is not a problem of the indart but the awful Flash erase times. If you need to use the HDFlash parts buy a DVP3, it will make life much easier. Infact the dvp3 is easier to use compared to the full emulator emu3/2.
The usb parts are very good/reliable but the dvp3 is not available so your choices are indart or the expensive emu. I can give a bit more info if you give more details on project etc.
Hope this helps sjo
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