There are many IDEs used for STM32 development. There are 19 listed on ST's website. Among them, the commonly used commercial software are:
- MDK-ARM-STM32
- IAR-EWARM
Although these two commercial software are easy to use, they are commercial software after all. Free or evaluation versions of the software are either limited by part number or limited by program size.
There are many free STM32 development IDEs, which are basically based on Eclipse+GNU GCC.
There are tutorials on the Internet that introduce how to manually build the STM32 development environment with Eclipse + GNU GCC, but the process is cumbersome, and because of the differences in versions, the content of each tutorial is different. I have tried many times without success.
Now STMicroelectronics mainly promotes the development method of HAL+STM32CubeMX. The STM32CubeMX software can visually configure chip resources and pins, and generate all source programs of the project. At present, the IDE or toolchain supported by the STM32CubeMX export project is as follows
As can be seen in the figure, there are only two free IDEs, TrueSTUDIO and SW4STM32. Both of these IDEs are based on Eclipse. The installer integrates various plug-ins required for complete STM32 development, and no additional configuration is required.
I actually installed these two software, and used STM32CubeMX to generate a simple GPIO control LED project, tested it with the development board, and found that
- The Debug of SW4STM32 is very problematic. A very simple program will die when DEBUG, while the program with the same function has no problem in MDK and TrueSTUDIO.
TrueSTUDIO can be well integrated with STM32CubeMX, and there is no problem with program compilation, download and debugging.
The bottom line: Atollic, the company behind TrueSTUDIO, has now been acquired by STMicroelectronics.
The home page of Atollic's official website is displayed as follows.
TrueSTUDIO is now completely free, STMicroelectronics will vigorously develop its own IDE tool TrueSTUDIO in the future, and STM32CubeMX's support for TrueSTUDIO must be no problem. In this case, other free IDEs based on Eclipse+GCC have no advantage over TrueSTUDIO.
System Workbench (ie SW4STM32) is a free tool developed by AC6 and provided by the Open STM32 Community community jointly maintained by STMicroelectronics. It is not an official development tool of STMicroelectronics.
Another free development tool is CooCox's CoIDE, which ranks first in the IDEs listed on ST's official website and is also based on Eclipse+GCC. In addition to an IDE environment, there is also CoSmart for device visual configuration, similar to STM32CubeMX (but currently CoSmart does not support STM32 series devices, only Holtek and Nuvoton devices). Although the functions of CooCox's series of tools are relatively comprehensive, the STM32CubeMX export project does not support CoIDE, and its development efficiency is obviously not as good as several IDEs supported by STM32CubeMX.
Because it is to develop some teaching examples for an STM32F4 development board, after various tests and comparisons, TrueSTUDIO is finally selected as the STM32 development tool.