开云体育

Keil is nowhere near free, except a politician's definition.

However, ST Micro has free tools.

I think that Freescale has as well (although it may be limited).

I think NXP's tool is free.

TI's tool is free for certain product lines.

Even Xilinx has a free tool for some of their FPGA/CPLD; and Atmel (oops... microchip) has or had a free tool for the ATMEGA and XMEGA series.? Haven't used it in years, though.

I've used Keil, it has some nicer features than the ST Micro tools (mostly in figuring out what's doing what), but then again, I think that ST may have them, somewhere.

For the manufacturer's tools, the software is locked to their products.? That may not be all that bad.

PlatformIO seems to be a generic style compiler (will do ESP8266, ATMEL, and so on.? Even the Arduino IDE will do some other chips, but the lack of debugging is a show stopper... unless they added it).

If I were a company, and I had big dollars, I'd buy a commercial package for support issues.? Such commercial packages may have traceability back to industry standards demanded by customers....

I'm not a business, and don't have the deep pockets.

Free is good.? Quality Free is better.

For 13 to 30 dollars (or so) for basic ST development boards of various form factors and capabilities, and considering the lack of chip microprocessors, ST isn't bad.

But, the free tools are out there.

Harvey