Lots of horror stories from people who had to respin their boards because you couldn't buy ST at any price when they redirected all their output to car manufacturers during the chip shortage. They may be cheaper now but vendor lock-in never helped anyone (except that vendor) in the long run. Oh, and most Chinese wifi gadgets use Beken nowadays because it's even cheaper than Espressif, what are the chances of them switching to a more expensive chipset instead?
We never had problems as a small vendor with ST during the chip crisis and all distributors honored our delivery contracts. Even most big companies don't deal with ST directly when it comes to the last mile.
Porting stuff to another microcontroller would be easy as we are not using too proprietary features... as long the uC has SPI/I2C and a bunch of timers the embedded developers will be happy. Thanks to Zephyr.
That only gets you proper support for a couple vendors (Nordic, ST), everything else is a nightmare. Even with better-supported vendors, there are whole swaths of things that aren't properly supported and you need to directly call code from underlying vendor SDK to make things work. That bodge makes the whole project non-portable. Even some simple things like ADC DMA on ST F1 series..
ST doesn't want to make one because then you can do OTA firmware updates without their special $60 usb to serial adapter that won't work for non-st parts
Except when they don't. Last time I tried an ST part, I specifically bought one that advertised UART bootloader.
It didn't. Every piece of documentation I could find said that it did, but it would never respond. Forums were full of people complaining about this problem for years with no response from ST. No datasheet or marketing update, no errata. You just get a useless chip and it's your problem now. They also never responded to any of my direct emails or messages.
Every time I've tried an ST part, it's been hell and I eventually gave up and used an Atmel part instead. Every time.
Thanks a ton! Was afraid that that's the answer - and that there's no reasonably priced aggregator/abstraction layer, eg like https://open-meteo.com for ECMWF.
You rang ;-) I’m in the middle of adding more ECMWF data that will be released as open data starting October 1st. At the moment, only a limited set of lower-resolution (0.25°) ECMWF forecasts can be shared open-data. That’s going to change in a big way, though I can’t share more details just yet.
There's also Blitzortung.org which is a very interesting project.
They are receiving Sferics on the lower HF frequencies and tag them with GPS timestamps (with the PPS signal they are in the Nanoseconds precision range). A central server will then do the triangulation.
All with off-the-shelf hardware (STM32, etc.).
Their service is stable for many many years now.
(Offtopic: The STM32H7 ADC is great for many many things)
Whenever it thundered I used to love to take out my shortwave radio, tune into some empty frequency and be able to hear each individual lightning strike in realtime (even more realtime than the speed of sound would allow!)
I’d like to ask to repeat this experiment but with a ferrite core next to the sensor (touching it). On the low spectrum (below a few MHz?) the magnetic component in the electromagnetic wave becomes dominant. Which is why receivers in shortwave radio and in e.g. DCF77 use a ferrite antenna. The ferrite’s length should be perpendicular to the line formed by the sensor and the location of the storm.
Edit: you’re reading at 400 Hz so you’ll read phenomena below 200 Hz
Blitzortung is a little long in the tooth. Great tech, but the mapping doesn't let you get any detail. Lightningmaps.org scrapes the feed but will sometimes just completely stop functioning and never come back.
> But most people don't learn the big CADs first, they learn Fusion. The few times I've tried Fusion, it's given me a headache. It's probably a bigger headache going the other direction.
Siemens Solid Edge also has a hobbyist version with very fair terms.
Still used nowadays: airplane reflections are being used by ham radio dudes. There's a software around that even calculates the optimal reflection parameters based on ADS-B aggregators.
Thanks too relatively modern digital modes this doesn't need too much transmission power.
On the upper GHz bands with dishes they even manage to do reliable FM chats. But that requires a lot of gain and active steering of the dish.
