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My Brief Thoughts on Roadtesting

14rhb

To make a point on Renesas RX72N Envision Kit | element14 |without detracting from the subject matter of compilers, GUI or board capability I have broken my thoughts out here regarding who is attracted to roadtesting such embedded development boards and hence the licensing of software.

 

I believe more roadtesters are keen hobbyists or students and therefore have a limited budget preventing them purchasing the niche software required to continue using these products. Instead they rely on the free or time limited software available from the vendor. Once the roadtest is complete that software can expire quite quickly and the board gets little use afterwards. This is a pity as the board never appears again in future projects or blog posts. The board's roadtest also often consists of showing the demo software only, perhaps with a few changes.

 

Conversely, professional developers will likely buy development boards as part of their companies work plan and the boss would also likely agree to paying for the software, supporting license agreements over the period of the project. All the testing and development is undertaken in that team and the end goal is to make money by selling a product, and such people have less time available to come onto E14 to roadtest and review.

 

I'd like to see more open source support for such embedded boards with manufacturers perhaps issuing licenses to their software to allow the 'hobbyist' end of the roadtesters to continue using the product. Should they create something appealing then the manufacturer would likely benefit from the increased orders for the hardware itself? However being able to identify useful open source solutions that roadtesters can use and build skills in should be encouraged.

 

Just in case this post reads as a case to stop roadtests or for manufacturers to stop sponsoring them, please read on ! I'm confident the roadtests are read by professional developers when picking out new products for their development - so very useful still. I also need to add, IMO many of the keen hobbyists and students take the knowledge gained from roadtesting back into companies, maybe as their day job or when they start a career. Regardless of which end of that skills and application scale the member is at, all the comments in roadtests etc are invaluable, available for all to see/learn from and action accordingly. My last point is that I have actually bought several pieces of test equipment and dev boards for colleagues at my work following roadtests by other members on E14, although I class myself as a hobbyist  image.

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  • I think it's a rarity for a road test to rely on time-limited software or features. I know it has happened on occasion, but is far from the norm. I completely understand how frustrating this would be if you didn't realise in advance though.

     

    Considering how many microcontroller manufacturers provide a fully featured free development environment, I'd have though that not doing so would be a distinct competitive disadvantage. After all, if you put a stumbling block in the way of people properly trying your product it's harder to get them familiar enough to want to pay for it.

  • in reply to Fred27

    This comparison with other MCU vendors is quite unfair. Most vendors nowadays produce MCUs with ARM instruction set which means that they get all opensource toolset optimized over years for free and their "fully featured free development environment" is usually eclipse with changed spashcreen and some other small mods. In fact compiler for Renesas MCUs based on ARM is totaly free and it is also avalaible in almost every Linux distribution in packaging system. This is big advantage of ARM cores.

     

    But situation is completly different when you look to proprietary MCU cores. Because of high concurency environment on the market, most vendors provided their even proprietary compilers also for free. Some of them based their proprietary compilers on GCC and these compilers are usualy also for free. But still Renesas is not a single vendor with paid compiler license. Some examples of other MCU vendors with paid compilers:

     

    Microchip's PIC32 - recommended compiler is MPLAB XC32 - paid

    ST's STM8 - recommended compiler is CXSTM8 - Originally paid, but vendor negotiate to be free. There are notices that it is free only for one year. I am not sure if can be extended for another year for free.

    Toshiba 8-bit MCU like this one - for informations about development environment contact sales image image image image

     

    In fact, renasas can afford this starategy because their proprietary cores are very good and they are very powerfull (at least at the first look). Some benchmarks shows that they are more powerfull than comparable ARM cores running on the same frequency due to more efficient instruction set and its implementation. Also note that cores run on higher frequency than is usual in ARM world. When you multiple this two facts, Renesas performance benefit over ARM may be even more significant. But if you want to join world of this ultra powerfull MCUs, you must pay a lot...

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  • in reply to Fred27

    This comparison with other MCU vendors is quite unfair. Most vendors nowadays produce MCUs with ARM instruction set which means that they get all opensource toolset optimized over years for free and their "fully featured free development environment" is usually eclipse with changed spashcreen and some other small mods. In fact compiler for Renesas MCUs based on ARM is totaly free and it is also avalaible in almost every Linux distribution in packaging system. This is big advantage of ARM cores.

     

    But situation is completly different when you look to proprietary MCU cores. Because of high concurency environment on the market, most vendors provided their even proprietary compilers also for free. Some of them based their proprietary compilers on GCC and these compilers are usualy also for free. But still Renesas is not a single vendor with paid compiler license. Some examples of other MCU vendors with paid compilers:

     

    Microchip's PIC32 - recommended compiler is MPLAB XC32 - paid

    ST's STM8 - recommended compiler is CXSTM8 - Originally paid, but vendor negotiate to be free. There are notices that it is free only for one year. I am not sure if can be extended for another year for free.

    Toshiba 8-bit MCU like this one - for informations about development environment contact sales image image image image

     

    In fact, renasas can afford this starategy because their proprietary cores are very good and they are very powerfull (at least at the first look). Some benchmarks shows that they are more powerfull than comparable ARM cores running on the same frequency due to more efficient instruction set and its implementation. Also note that cores run on higher frequency than is usual in ARM world. When you multiple this two facts, Renesas performance benefit over ARM may be even more significant. But if you want to join world of this ultra powerfull MCUs, you must pay a lot...

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  • in reply to misaz

    Speculating, but sometimes there could be awkward licensing agreements too. Say they use (hypothetically) libraries of code they licensed for the compilers or other development tools. The owner of that IP might want to be paid per copy used. That could make it hard to just have a free download for all, without tracking it, and maybe charging a fee.

    I've no idea. However for a review item, I guess it's just internally difficult to arrange the license sometimes, they might not be geared up for that. I used to have such problems too, where I would want to give customers the license to equipment as well, but it cannot be given for free (accounting/fraud laws) and so some internal processes need to be followed to order licenses just as a real customer would, and charge it elsewhere internally but perhaps at a discount. That's the kind of stuff maybe IT systems are inflexible at because they were designed for smooth customer sales requirements in mind first, and the mechanism for internal purchases can be more difficult or buggy.

     

    The Renesas chips are cool, agree on that! I remember the Renesas parts seeming to be really ahead of their time, having huge amounts of Flash and on-board bootloader, great speed and tons of peripherals, when the 8-bit PICs and AVRs were just starting to become popular.. and PICs required the expensive programmers.

  • in reply to misaz

    I'm not sure what exactly is "unfair" about comparing different microcontrollers. I was thinking of the microcontrollers I have used a lot - TI's MSP430 (and also ARM) devices, NXP. I agree that the IDE's tend to be Eclipse-based, but what's the problem with that? Maybe I was biased towards devices that had a free IDE, but that sort of proves my point.

  • in reply to misaz

    Although they are probably targetting at a different market, I think an interesting alternative approach is what Espressif did with the ESP8266 and ESP32.