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HDMI is not so common on the Cortex-M range. If you need rich GUI or hardware media decoding/encoding probably cheap Cortex-A will be a better choice where you can run embedded linux with all whistles and bells. Well, it's not so real-time but so far in my experience there was almost no project where it was really necessary. Another approach is to use Cortex-M core for the real-time tasks and Cortex-A for the GUI - there are lot of offers where these cores are bundled on the same SoC. And it will not add costs - few days ago there was GUI capable board $7 DongshanPI-PicoW is a small Arm Linux board with SSW101B USB WiFi chip, four 12-pin headers - CNX Software[^]. Of course you need to keep in mind that such suppliers could disappear in a year. Similar TI or ST SoC that will be in production for 10 years costs x5 or x10, then you need to put it on board with all the necessary components, etc ... as you can see everything matters. Hardware is hard business.
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I'm not limiting us to the M line. I found at least one A7 that will do HDMI, and is very affordable, plus more than we need for most UI/UX needs. I don't necessarily need HDMI, as I could potentially use RGB 24-bit LCD interfaces given enough pins. I'm assuming the Cortex series can drive a series of digital pins via DMA (the ESP32 can and uses it for RGB but only supports 16-bit - most screens are 24)
Adding, I'm not the hardware person here. I have a couple of engineers I work with. I am the adventurous one willing to branch out and expand our hardware options. Part of this is for me, and part of it is to have something to bring to my engineers.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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I should have explicitly said, I do not count the STM32 Nucleo boards, because are all Arm Cortex M0s, have no flash, no ram, and no HDMI
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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Possibly start with a Seeed Studio Xiao board, and bootstrap your way up from that? Just an idea.
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Yeah I use it daily, and aside from some Arduino compliant STM32 Cortex M0 based boards and such, it doesn't support ARMs. The Cortex M0 is kind of one off for this purpose in that a lot of people have produced Arduino compatible HALs for Cortex M0 based devkits like the STM32 boards.
Now a Cortex A or say an M7 isn't going to be supported because they have nothing for it.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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I was a C++ on AVR (NOT Arduino) person for many years. I switched to Atmel ARM devices (i.e. ARM M0+ and M4) years ago as they became bigger, faster, cheaper, lower power, etc. If you are targeting bare metal embedded applications, I would suggest using Atmel Studio 7 with GCC C++ and ASF (Advanced Software Framework). I believe ASF will provide the drivers and hardware abstraction you are looking for. They will warn you that ASF does not support C++, but ASF functions can be called as extern "C" functions. Use Atmel ICE for downloading code, source-code level debugging, and target register read/write. I wrote my own cooperative task-switching executive and resident interactive interpreter/compiler. I typically connect my embedded systems to a PC via multiple USB logical serial connections using multiple endpoints. This is very handy for separating control, status, and debugging streams.
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Thanks!
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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I use Renesas and NXP micros (usual disclaimer) and both of those manufacturers offer free dev environments.
They are Eclipse based, use gcc and have built-in hardware configuration tools that generate the HAL code for you.
There is a bit of a learning curve with the tools, but so far my experience with both of them has been positive overall.
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I saw that for their devkits, just not individual chips and I'm wondering if the toolchain and HAL code will work with all of them. Each one has very specific peripheral hardware on-chip and so the registers vary chip to chip.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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The tools allow you to select chips or boards. If you choose a board the tools have awareness of the other hardware on the board.
I try to arrange it so that target hardware is compatible with the dev board (as far as possible) to ease the transition from dev to "real" h/w. I also try to only use chips that have a readily available dev board, but I realise that this is not always possible. The on-board debug support is very handy.
These days it's rare for me to have to look at register maps, I just use the apis provided.
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Your latest comment is still pending and I'm impatient  so I'm responding here (I can see it via email)
Thank you for the advice. It's very helpful for me because I am looking as much as anything, for a usable workflow for developing with NXP ARM offerings, and it sounds like you have one that's not that complicated. Cheers. I owe you a beer.
And as far as avoiding the registers and using the APIs that's exactly what I was hoping for, vs using GCC and a raw toolchain+register maps. Thank you again.
To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.
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Check out TI, they've got their own IDE (Eclipse based) that makes it relatively easy to get started. They have their own RTOS but it was easy to use FreeRTOS in a project I worked on.
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If you want to aim lower than Linux, you might look at NXP's product line, e.g. the LPC1788. I've used this for several years now. You can get a completely free development stack. NXP's MCUXpresso as the Eclipse-based development environment, FreeRTOS as the kernel, emWin as the graphic library (free binary version from NXP), LWIP as the TCP/IP stack (FreeRTOS+TCP wasn't an option back then). Getting the first project off the ground takes a lot of effort, but after that it's pretty easy to clone off new projects. There are some development boards that can help you get your feet wet: Embedded Artists' board or e.g. smaller boards like this one or this one, along with one of their displays.
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Guide strap coerced and made stronger. (10)
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012
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Nice one Peter
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Guide strap REIN
coerced FORCED
and made stronger
REINFORCED
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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YAUT!. I was nearly going to put "made harder" so you had three 10 letter anagrams to consider. 
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012
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Nice clue! 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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#Worldle #451 2/6 (100%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜➡️
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🎉
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr
not too hard
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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#Worldle #452 2/6 (100%)
🟩🟩🟩⬛⬛➡️
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🎉
⭐⭐
https:
You right not too hard
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Wordle 668 4/6
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
⬛🟩🟩🟩🟩
⬛🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Why is it that, when there's a choice of 2 or more single letters to complete a word, I always choose the wrong ones first?
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Wordle 668 X/6
⬜🟨⬜⬜🟨
🟨🟨⬜🟨⬜
🟨🟩🟩⬜⬜
⬜🟩🟩⬜🟩
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
Lost today.
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Wordle 668 4/6
⬜🟨🟨⬜🟨
🟨🟩🟩⬜⬜
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Hey, same thing happens to me too!
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