Please make infographics usable again

[waclawek.jan]

In order to make informed decisions on chosing a mcu model, we need... well... information.

The older STM32-family infographics contained a fair amount of information about what to expect in terms of available peripheral mix from a given family and its constituents. The newer ones don't, forcing us to dig deep to individual model's pages and pdfs to painstakingly extract and organize that information. For example, for the new 'U5, we have:

 

whereas this is what is for the - roughly comparable - 'L4:

I've highlighted the kind of information missing from the 'U5's.

The very same principle applies e.g. to the Nucleo infographics, I've complained about it prevously , being rejected by ST on grounds of "would be too complex". I'm afraid ST's argument would be the same here. But it's improper: note, that we are software developers. We don't use mobile phones to select products. Our monitors are thousands of pixels wide and high. We can navigate - pan and zoom - pictures. We need condensed information, we don't have time to click through dozens of webpages and pdfs and make the comparisons up ourselves.

Would you need to make presentations to managers, that's an entirely different story; but please do cater for us, engineers, too.

JW

[STTwo-32]

Hello @waclawek.jan 

Thank you so much for posting. I think that the product selector tool can do the job. It is interactive and you can use it as it is or configure some filters according to your request. You can also use the CubeFinder on standalone version (for PC and smartphone), or the version integrated on the STM32CubeMX.For the infographics, I will escalate your feedback to our Marketing team.

Best Regards.

STTwo-32

[Bassett.David]

Hello Jan,

I like your request and rational regarding the intended audience of ST's materials!

One thing I wanted to point out though: CubeMX can be pretty useful to narrow down the part candidates.  By checking the essential requirements of your project you can quickly eliminate many uninteresting candidates.

The other aspect of CubeMX I find useful is pinout planning.  I'm not even tempted to let it generate code however...

Regards,

Dave

[waclawek.jan]

Hi Dave,

Thanks. 

I am aware of this feature of CubeMX and even am aware of existence of the standalone MCU Finder. However, I find using these - as well as using the detailed selector on the web, suggested by @STTwo-32 above - rather cumbersome in the initial stages of a project, when the basic overview of what is available has to be established.

The infographics, while they may be lacking in detail, are a great tool to make basic judgement "at a glance".

I wrote this rant because of a very particular situation I was a couple of days ago: I was discussing with one of my clients the possibility to replace a 'L4 in their current design. He suggested a chinese competitor to ST, and I went to that competitor's website to show how hard is to judge whether any of their offering fits even the basic requirements of the design, as the chinese manufacturers rarely provide easy to use and well structured basic overview of their chips' capabilities.

"Contrary to that", I said, "ST has these neat infographics, from which we can immediately see, whether a given family fits the bill" - and with this, I opened the 'U5 webpage to showcase this to my client...

JW