Idea: DSO138+

[filker0]

If the STM32103C8 was replaced by a STM32L433CB, the board would have:

• A Cortex-M4F in place of the Cortex-M3 (mainly adds single precision floating point)
  More RAM on-chip (64KiB vs. 20KiB)
  More Flash on-chip (128KiB vs. 64KiB)
  Higher clock rate (80MHz vs. 72MHz)
  DSP instructions
  Flash execution acceleration for 0 wait state execution

I think the two chips are mostly pin compatible, so minimal rework on the hardware layout would be required. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure the firmware would need several updates (clock configuration, pin function selection, etc.). I'm also not sure the peripherals are register compatible, so updates to the drivers for the ADC, GPIO, UART, etc. might be required.

The higher performance would be great, the DSP could allow more features, but the real reason I'm bringing this up is that the additional RAM and Flash would permit more functionality, such as:

• Longer sample storage
  USB device support to double as a USB oscilloscope
  Protocol Analyzer for serial protocols (RS-232)
  Audio Spectrum Analyzer

The price difference for the MCU is fairly small. The new features could be developed as plug-ins (at the source level), and different firmware images (having different sets of added functions) might be licensed differently. Or it could all be part of the base price. The functionality can be left as-is, as well, and let the community come up with the new functionality.

I'm an embedded software engineer, not a hardware engineer, so I may be way off base here. I've worked with several STMicro MCUs, but they've all been Cortex-M4 (STM32F4xx, STM32L4xx) or Cortex-M7 (STM32F7xx), so I may have missed something big that makes this idea impractical.

Does anyone else think this is worth looking at?

[jye1]

Thank you very much for the suggestions. I pretty much agree to what you said. We will soon release a new model that uses STM32F303 series (Cortex-M4 core). It doesn't have DSP. But has larger ROM and RAM. Most important its ADC speed can be up to 5Msps. This makes bandwidth much higher than that of DSO138. The new model has two channels.o