Hello All,
I'm new to this board and looking for some opinions. I've searched the board a bit and found similar questions but not quite what I'm looking for. I'm looking for some help deciding on an SoC to use for embedded system applications.
I've taken a intro embedded systems course at my University, however the normal professor left the semester before so a CE grad student was forced to teach the class. As a result I feel like I didn't get the best education from it. In the course we used a smartfusion SoC, I feel like I know that board pretty well however I don't want to go out and spend over 100$ just for the board. Also I'd rather not have to interface the MPU to an FPGA.
Before the end of the semester and doing a lot of research I hastily bought a Rpi 2. Doing a bit more research and playing around with it, I've come to the conclusion it isn't the best board for baremetal C. A lot of the code is already given to you when what I want to do is write the code and drivers myself.
In the end I want to get into robotics with whatever platform I'm using. My question is this… should I stick with the Rpi and just learn to rewrite some of the libraries or should I get a different board such as the beaglebone? Another issue I have with the Rpi is if I want to do baremetal C, then flashing the MPU is a pain, so preferably I would like an IDE to debug and flash my code.
For now the embedded system design is just a hobbyist thing, but in the future I'd like to be able to actually work as an embedded designer. I want to get close to the metal as opposed to high level abstracted away design. Ahead of time, thank you for your responses.
Best Answer
I suggest you get a Discovery Kit for STM32 F4 Series with STM32F407VG MCU like this one. This is an absolute steal for $14.88. The 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 processor has 1 MB of flash and a 192K of RAM. It also includes two PWM's for motor control.
You can expand the I/O using this STM32F4 Discovery Shield. It allows the addition of up to four Click boards, such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and dozens of others. Unfortunately, no H-bridges -- but there is a prototype Click board where you could wire your own.