Innovation

[jcabetas]

I have used Olimex products for several years, specially the ARM STM32 based boards, and I've been completely satisfied with the quality and design of the boards. However, while three years ago Olimex was continuously innovating, there are no new products lately (at least on the STM32 parts).

Olimex has a very taught full engineering team, so I'm sure that they will envision new ideas and exceptional new boards.... please, Olimex, keep on innovation!!

[JohnS]

Perhaps because there are much more powerful (*) and cheaper chips?

(Allwinner and so on.)

(*) faster, more RAM/ROM/IOs/etc

John

[olimex]

Hi,

You are right that we didn't pay much attention to generic microcontrollers recently, because Linux computers and IoT Espressif boards keep our designers busy. We do many new complex boards (now expanding SOM204 family) and they take lot of time to complete, it's not the casual microcntroller board which you can put together and layout for a week.

This is why this forum board is, if some of our customers see interesting uC and we feel it interesting too we probably will make board for it.

Recently EBV point our attention to iMX RT, Microchip also releases some chips which are in the same segment, but these all seems to be 5-6 years lag behind SOCs from Allwinner, Rockchip etc. DDR2, 600Mhz etc for price double than the Chinese vendors.
I just do not see point to go from A64 running at 1.2Ghz to MCU with DDR2 running at 600Mhz just because somebody released it now. Performance wise it will be disaster for somebody who already try and work with A13 for instance to move back to such "new" SOCs.
Microchip still struggles to release MIPS with external SDRAM capable to run Linux, while the RT5350 is available for many many years.

Tsvetan

[kyrk.5]

Microchip have even problems to bring out a new debugger that is working properly. Not spoken from the problem that ICD3 under MPLAB 8 is much more faster (single step) than under MPLABX. And they do not have any uC that have multicore.

I am still wondering what Microchip is doing all the time...

Microchip and Arduino are two different words, so the newcomers (younger people) to the embedded systems wont choose microchip. I do not see how younger people would be attracted to microchip. Over the years I think a lack of interesting have been developed over the microchip products. While 10 yeas ago they offered a cheap and good debugger with a good working environment and interesting starter kits, now they offer a bad and slow debugger for lot of money and a slow IDE. And I do not see any support for arduino (while I am not using it and I personally does not like it, it is an important feature with that younger people can be attracted). I guess this is also be visible on the sales, that a PIC32 PCB wont be ordered so fast and so much. Right?