NECTO Studio

trebla

Joined Jun 29, 2019
599
I don't like this NECTO thing, IMO this is mostly useful if you rely only on the MIKROE ecosystem. Their previous IDE-s are much more convient and useful for fast prototyping. MIKROE -s idea is to make development process for any existing MCU identical and therefore it uses highly abstracted mikroSDK libraries for click boards. You can download these libraries freely from github and look at the code. You can strip down some abstractions and change some anothers for use these click board drivers with your toolchain and MCU. This can sometimes save time but these drivers are not always in good quality and complete (may have only basic functionality) .
 

Thread Starter

Futurist

Joined Apr 8, 2025
748
I don't like this NECTO thing, IMO this is mostly useful if you rely only on the MIKROE ecosystem. Their previous IDE-s are much more convient and useful for fast prototyping. MIKROE -s idea is to make development process for any existing MCU identical and therefore it uses highly abstracted mikroSDK libraries for click boards. You can download these libraries freely from github and look at the code. You can strip down some abstractions and change some anothers for use these click board drivers with your toolchain and MCU. This can sometimes save time but these drivers are not always in good quality and complete (may have only basic functionality) .
I stumbled upon them by accident, it seems to be a truly interesting company doing a lot of interesting stuff. Developing a IDE is a huge effort, that's why there aren't very many. I'm not sure why they'd undertake such an investment but I'm sure they did their market research.

I got the same impression, that it's an attempt to lock customers in but as I studied them I found it isn't specific to their hardware, although I'm sure it has a strong coupling to them.

Having said that it is free for non commercial use...

I'm not a professional MCU developer (but I've been a professional software engineer for about 45 years) so I've settled on Microsoft Visual Studio (not to be confused with Visual Studio Code).

There is no better IDE and I use VisualGDB which is inexpensive and gives me all the power of VS with my personal MCU projects, I tried several other methods some years ago but they were feeble, I had to use Eclipse on a big Java system several years ago and was amazed that a company would base its software development on such a clumsy collection of "free" tools that costs so much in terms of productivity.

Personally I insist on absolutely very high quality in software and that includes the tools used to create software, using el-cheapo software tools is just as bad as using el-cheapo meters, scopes etc.
 
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Thread Starter

Futurist

Joined Apr 8, 2025
748
I'm not sure about this research :)
Well I did take a look at MIKROE and they seem like a decent sizeable outfit, solvent and profitable, so I expect they put some thought into their IDE product (having said that I don't think I'd be devoting resources to such a product if I was running the place, but without seeing the numbers...).

It also supports remote debugging - that's pretty interesting.

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nsaspook

Joined Aug 27, 2009
16,321
Well I did take a look at MIKROE and they seem like a decent sizeable outfit, solvent and profitable, so I expect they put some thought into their IDE product (having said that I don't think I'd be devoting resources to such a product if I was running the place, but without seeing the numbers...).

It also supports remote debugging - that's pretty interesting.

View attachment 348547
The make good dev board modules that can be a solid foundation for a custom design. Their software examples are usually too generic for production use.
 
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trebla

Joined Jun 29, 2019
599
I use different MIKROE Easy series development boards often for testing software ideas or set up some temporary lab equipment. Their Clicker and Clicker 2 evaluation boards are very useful for prototyping. I have used their mikromedia boards (display+DAC+MCU) for demonstration prototypes. MIKROE makes very useful HW but, sorry, i don't like the NECTO software.
 
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