The coolest gadget of the Embedded World 2009 in Nuremberg

A couple weeks ago, I was visiting the Embedded World in Nuremberg. First of all, this show did not appear to be impacted too much by the recession, in fact, it was bigger than ever and there were still plenty of engineers visiting this venue.

Looking around with focus on MCUs / microcontrollers, there was a buzz towards Cortex-M based devices. Whether that was the new announcement from ST for the STM32F105 and STM32F107 (preliminary datasheet) or the Luminary Stellaris  LM3S9B95, running twice as fast as the Cortex-M3 devices from Luminary thus far or the NXP announcement to license the Cortex-M0 core, a new version of the software standard CMSIS for Cortex based microcontrollers (CMSIS tutorial from Doulos), all of that was a strong sign how serious ARM is to promote the Cortex-M standard. 

The new devices high end Cortex M3 all seem to converge to a common feature set that includes Ethernet, CAN and USB. So far, the STM32 was missing Ethernet, that is resolved now, the LM3S family was missing USB, resolved now, LM3S was rather slow, resolved now...

As competitors will be offering very similar devices, it is essential to lure customers in with low cost, easy to use yet attractive gadgets. The STM32 Primer2 (User Manual Primer2) is such a gadget that is outstanding in feature set, yet low cost. The cooperation between ST and Raisonance created a very interesting evaluation system backed up by an already numerous and fast growing online community. Leaves me wondering what will be next from NXP, Luminary, Toshiba or some time in the future Atmel with a SAM3.

For now I consider the coolest gadget the STM32 Primer2!