Hi Tybos,
Thank you for the comments. You did very good job on your Canyon game project. You have very clear coding style and I think it could be very educational for other developers. I especially like the scrolling technique and I think it is very creative. Congratulations for your work!
I am a guy likes new technologies and new ideas. I don’t think we should limit our imagination and ideas in creating new projects. Throwing ideas could help stimulate other people’s mind and the brainstorming could have some unexpected results. Some ideas could be done with efforts although some of them might not practical limited by the resources. Of cause in comparison with other commercial available ECG machine or other gadgets the ECG primer is very primitive. But in many embedded applications we don’t need to use the ECG machine with price tag of thousands of dollars (even the ECG leads could cost $300). In the same way, you can not compare the STM32 Primary games with Playstation or Xbox games. I think all the games posted are very good. The fun is the creative – you need to make the nice game or gadgets from the small, low cost and resource limiting platform.
I think the STM32 Primer is a very well designed development platform. When the FAE put it on my office desk, I was immediately attracted by its compact size, the bright color LCD display, the creative accelerometer driving control style and well thought peripherals. Although I tried the other company’s ARM Cortex M3 microcontroller on the earlier contest and became the winner (French Yahoo, PRNewWire and Circuit Cellar Article), I found STM32 has more technically advantages over the Luminary Micros LM3S811 microcontroller. The LM3S811 lacks of DMA channels. I have to use many CPU cycles for moving the data sampled from the ADC. The STM32 even has the built-in USB controller but LM3S811 does not have (I had to use another chip on board and went through serial simulation for the USB connection). The Raisonance 132x132 bright color LCD is much more impressive than the 16x96 monochrome OLED display on the LM3S811 evaluation board. I also very impressed by the Raisonance small footprint OS which the developer much easier to access the low-level registers. I think the STM32 Primer should be a development platform not just limited by game applications (although the games are very import area in the STM32 society) but also a platform for the other embedded developments. I think Raisonance has thought about this and planed the extension socket footprint J1 on the Primer PCB. It is true, as you said, many developers may not want modify the hardware. I think it is will be benefit to all the developers if in the next version the STM32 Primer package can be change to allow a tiny add-on card plug into the J1 socket. It can be used to create a lot practical gadgets, such a tilt meter with a laser beam alignment, ultrasound meter with space calculator, etc. The application developer can get the add-in card without worry about the soldering.
I hope every developers in the STM32 circle doing well!
Regards,
Jingxi